Berkeley, here I come!

Earlier this week, I went for a run.  I use this website called Gmap Pedometer to see how far my runs are, and you have to type in your town for it to zoom in.  So I get back, and I sit down, and I type, "berkeley, ca" into the search bar.

Whoops.

It was actually the first time I'd done that here.  When I first moved to Berkeley, oh so many moons ago, I typed "urbana, il" multiple times - sheer force of habit - and it made me a little sad every time.  This made me a little sad too, except that I'm leaving for Berkeley today, so mostly it was just a funny little trick that my fingers played on me.

Now I have to sit on planes and in airports for something like 11 hours, but it will all be worth it.  I can't wait to see everyone!  I am so so so excited!

Petite Crise

Well dios mío, I managed to bring some heat back to California with me from Illinois! It is legitimately hot today, for the second day in a row! (Crazy!) I love it. Granted, I feel a little gross and a lot sweaty, but at least now I feel like we had a teensy bit of a summer, whether we end up getting some more heat in September and October or not (that's normally our summer here).

Anyway, Illinois. I tell you what, living in California for two years has turned me into quite the Midwesterner. It's like having the contrast makes me realize what it means to be from the Midwest. Not to wax poetic or anything, but summer in the Midwest means wide open spaces and grass and humming cicadas and humidity and corn fields and sweat dripping down your back and melty ice cream and lovely, dear friends and family that you have missed so much more than you realized. I'm not going to lie; it was really hard being home. Much harder this year than I expected. It just wasn't long enough... only long enough to remember how very much I love everyone and wish that I had a few more days to spend with them. This is probably because I only spent about three days in C-U and then two days in Chicago, which ended up being somewhat unsatisfying and temporarily minor crisis-inducing.

Here is a story that sort of sums it up. In Chicago, I went out to dinner with George and Matt, my two best friends from studying abroad in France. We've all been very good about keeping in touch the past few years, despite the fact that I usually only see them about once a year now. We went to this fantastic Moroccan restaurant. George and I used to cook pseudo-Moroccan food on Friday nights at the American dorm in Paris, so it was a really nice idea, and the food was fantastic. It was so normal just sitting and having dinner with them, and yet I felt this sort 0f simmering panic underneath it all. Just knowing that it was going to be over way too soon, and I didn't know when I'd see them again, and why did I drag my husband and dogs out to California again and do I even really like linguistics that much, etc., etc. Matt was leaving for grad school on the east coast the next day and somewhat freaking out about that, and we all just sort of looked at each other and said, "What are we doing??"

And what are we doing? Getting out and seeing more of the world, meeting new people and making wonderful new friends to love and keep with us forever, for sure, but also leaving wonderful old friends behind! The world is a smaller place with phones and email and Facebook and whatever, but there's something about physically being in a place with people you love that makes emotions more acute. It's not that I needed to talk more with anyone back home, per se, because I talk to them all the time in various forms. But I sure would have liked more time just being physically in the same place as all of those wonderful folks I love so much. That might have made me a little less emotional about the whole trip, instead of just cramming all of those emotions into a few days and then coming back to California and sitting around stewing about it!

In any case, I knew it would be much better once my friends got back and once school related stuff started picking up again, and it certainly is. It is so nice to see everyone, and I love all of these people too, and they make it feel like home too. They're my little linguistics family and we can sit around and be huge nerds together and have a great time doing it. Yesterday was our annual departmental meeting, where the whole linguistics department gets together and everyone introduces themselves and then we eat cookies and mill about for a while. I also took it upon myself to invite all the grad students out for pizza last night. No one has really been organizing anything for the new students for the past few years, and I wanted to make sure they felt welcome and also give us an excuse to go out together, so I emailed everyone and decreed that we should meet at my favorite pizza place at 7:00 last night. And there was a really good turnout! It was really fun, although I didn't get to talk to all of the new first years because they came in later and sat at the opposite end of the table from me, but it's okay, there will be plenty of time for that.

Afterwards Jess and I thought it would be fun to go bowling, but everyone was tired and only six of us ended up going. But it was fun! I hadn't been bowling since I was like 17, I think. I had a pretty dismal first game and came in dead last, but I somehow managed to win the second game, so it evened out, I guess. Not that the point of bowling is to bowl, really. It was just nice to be with friends, and the "rolling a heavy thing down an oiled lane towards a bunch of pins" thing is pretty secondary.

I think the only other thing I want to add right now is that I ran 18 miles on Sunday and it wasn't even bad at all. I'm not sure which part of that is crazier. My next marathon is October 17th, and I realized that that means I'll be running 26.2 miles on my 26-and-2-days birthday, which is ridiculous but seems to make sense, in a stupid way. Anyway, I guess it looks like I'll be ready by then, I'll just have to get in a few 20 milers in September.

Can you believe I'm going to be 26? I can't. But I say that every year now.

Well, I think it's time to go by the store and buy some ice cream, because I am hot. I hope you all know how very much I love you; the older I get, the more I realize that it's the people in your life that make it worth living, and I am thankful for each and every one of you, whether we talk often or not at all. I have a pretty great life, and no right to complain about any aspect of it, except maybe that whole thing about how meeting new great people entails changing locations and missing old great people. But that is a fairly minor crisis in the scheme of things, n'est-ce pas?

Running... languages... the usual...

I'm not sure where this blog entry is going, because I don't have anything in particular to say, so we'll just see what happens.

Well, for one thing, I had a really great run on Sunday. Sorry if my running talk gets old, but it truly is an important part of my life, so it naturally comes to mind when I think about what I've been doing lately. Not only is it a constant, structuring, stabilizing force in my life, it also serves as a demarcator of sorts; by being one thing that remains constant over the years, no matter where I go or what else I'm doing in my life, I can measure the rest of my life against it, in a way. There is always running, and so how my running is going directly relates to how the rest of my life is going. I go through periods where I don't run very much because I'm too busy doing other things, or because I'm feeling blah and don't have the motivation to get out the door. Thankfully both of those things occur rather infrequently, and for short periods of time, because getting out and moving has a huge impact on my mood. I honestly cannot remember the last time I got home from a run feeling worse than when I left the house.

But anyway, I had a great run on Sunday, because I did some speed work. I haven't done any speed work since we lived in Urbana, and it is so exhausting and so rewarding at the same time. There is something supremely satisfying about pushing your body beyond what it thinks is possible. Like, nanny nanny boo boo, body, I showed you, you can do it. It's such a triumph of will, and leaves you with that wonderfully spent feeling. First I did about 4.25 miles with the dogs so I didn't have to feel guilty about leaving them at home, and also to break up the run. Then I ran up to a middle school track in north Berkeley (2 miles) and did 2 x 400 meters, 3 x 800 meters, and 2 x 400 meters again, as fast as I could, for a total of 2.5 miles of speed work, followed by 2 more miles back home, bringing my Sunday total to somewhere around 10.75 miles. I was a little sore yesterday and today, but in a really great way, and my goal is to keep this up - long runs every other Sunday, alternating with speed work of increasing length/intensity until my marathon in October. The race is a pretty tough course; I've heard it's harder than the San Francisco Marathon, and that wasn't exactly cake, although it wasn't as bad as I expected. In any case, I would of course like to beat my previous PR of 3:54... and as of now, I'm thinking my secret secret goal will be 3:40, but that's probably far too optimistic. We'll see how it goes.

In other news, I am getting so ridiculously excited to come home in August. In like, 3 weeks, that is! I am so tired of it being cold here. July in Berkeley seriously blows. I wore jeans and a long-sleeved shirt today and I was chilly all day, but I'm still in disbelief and indignant and refusing to wear a jacket or turn the heater back on in July. It's July. Where are the frickin' mosquitoes and miserable temperatures? It all feels so wrong. So anyway, it will be fantastic to be legitimately hot again, even if you poor Midwesterners will probably be quite ready for the muggy 90 degree days to stop by then. I'm also really happy to be able to spend a few days in C-U and a few in Chicago; that's why it took me so long to plan this trip, because I have three very dear friends who will be in Chicago at various times in August, and I really want/need to see them all, so I had to find a time when all of our schedules could overlap. It will be a very quick trip, for sure, but I need some Midwest love before I embark on another year in California. Just gotta recharge those hometown batteries sometimes.

So here is something really great. I accidentally did a minor Amazon.com splurge the other day, and my books all got here today! I realized it was high time to get a real Spanish dictionary, since I think the Spanish thing is more than a passing phase and is hopefully here to stay, and then I saw this really fun looking book called "Street Spanish" that's all about slang in the different parts of the Spanish speaking world and comes with a CD! So of course I had to get that, I mean, come on. And then, (then!) I only needed to spend 60 cents to qualify for free Super Shipper Savings or whatever, so I had to get a book about French slang to complement my Spanish one. Mi pobrecito francés! No pude olvidarlo! (My poor French, I couldn't just forget it!) So today after I finished my Spanish homework I learned/was reminded how to say all sorts of inappropriate things in French, and it was quite fun.

I was also extremely pleased with myself today when we had a surprise in-class essay, and I filled up nearly a whole page, no dictionary, no problem. I probably made a few mistakes or said some things in a weird way, but it is so exciting to know that I have gone from being able to say next to nothing in Spanish just four weeks ago to being able to give a reasonably lengthy answer to the prompt, "Have you ever visited Latin America? If so, where have you been and what did you do? If not, where would you like to go and why?" Boo. Yah. Present perfect, imperfect, preterite, present, future, and conditional tenses all in one essay, baby. Now that is progress.

I'm also excited (and this part is a little silly) because I scheduled my next haircut today, and I'm totally going to practice my Spanish on my haircut lady. She is the cutest, sweetest little woman from Mexico, and she's so adorably self-concious of her English, and it's really not that bad at all. But the next time I see her, I'm gonna bust out the Spanish and let her laugh at how I have to say things in a weird way because I have no vocabulary, and it should be a good time, I think.

Okay, that's enough for now. Je vous aime tous et j'ai vraiment hâte de vous voir au mois d'août! Gros gros gros bisous!

Wistful

I'm not exactly sure why, but I've been feeling wistful the past week or two. Like, starting to get subtle yearnings for home. There are several factors related to this development:

- I was looking at the webpage for the inaugural Illinois Marathon the other day. Man, I really want to run that race sometime. Maybe next year? But silly me, I traced over the whole course map, and it really made me miss running with Second Wind. A lot of the course follows the old marathon training runs. It's funny how grids of streets on a map can bring back so many memories.

- I've been reading James's blog (hi, James :) ), and his photography has developed this really dreamy, impressionistic view of C-U. Since we ran in a lot of the same places, I think we had a lot of the same visions of Urbana, and his pictures jar those images in my memory, like seeing the town pass through my peripheral vision during a twilight run.

- I miss all of you whenever you leave me a comment on these blog postings.

But anyway. My classes are still really good, and I become more and more sure that this is the right school for me as time goes on, which is a great feeling. I'm so glad to be solidifying in that direction, and not the opposite - if I were becoming more and more sure I don't want to write my dissertation here, I'd be pretty miserable!

Hey, speaking of being miserable in graduate school... my friend George will be in town this weekend! I'm so excited; I haven't seen him in almost a year, and it'll be fantastic to catch up. On a whim (the combination of my wistfulness and the knowledge that George is coming), I was looking back through old journal entries from Paris tonight. Here's part of one about our trip to Greece that made me laugh:

So we got in to Athens around 12:30 the Thursday night before break, and it was surprisingly easy to find the bus to the port, where our hotel was. I had my first experience of being paralyzed and having to ask George to say things for me when we bought tickets, which was odd, but fine. We get on the bus and this guy immediately asks the three of us, in French, with a Greek accent, if we’re French. Maybe because I was wearing French clothes and I might be pulling off the European look these days? Who knows. But we weren’t even speaking French at the time, I don’t think. So we tell him we’re not French in French, and George says something to him in Greek, so he says something to me and Matt in Greek when George goes up to validate his ticket, and Matt and I tell him in French we’re sorry but we don’t speak Greek, and then George comes back and says something in either English, French, or Greek… I forget, I just know the guy kept getting more and more confused, until he eventually says in French, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I understand where you’re from….” So we explained that we’re Americans studying abroad in France for the year, that Matt and I only speak English and French, but that George speaks Greek too. The first of several interesting language situations.

So we’re on the bus, headed for the port, surprisingly not tired, especially considering I was up the entire night before writing my stupid paper for my Paris IV class that I ended up not even being able to turn in because there were manifestants [protesters] outside of Malesherbes [the school building] because of the whole CPE thing [proposed new employment policy] and no one could get in. Anyway… we’re clipping along at some ungodly speed, dodging other vehicles as though on a moped, when we finally get on the highway that goes around the perimeter of the city and the traffic up ahead is at a standstill. The bus driver pulls up on the sidewalk for some reason… it seems in retrospect that it might have been to let ambulances and police cars through, but I honestly can’t say whether I’m making that up so it’ll make more sense or not… and just stops. This guy in the very back of the bus starts yelling at the bus driver, who starts yelling back, and Matt and I have no idea what’s going on, but George is laughing and promising to translate in a second. Then the doors of the bus open and everyone but us files out and starts smoking. It turns out the guy was telling the bus driver if he was going to be an idiot and just pull over on the sidewalk like that, he might as well be reasonable and open the doors to let him go out and have a cigarette. Apparently everyone thought that was a good idea. Eventually the bus driver started yelling at everyone to get back in again so we could go, and we made it to the port and to the hotel around 2:00, I think. It was a perfectly Greek start to things. I really like how everyone yells at everyone else, but it’s like… good-natured. It’s cool; that’s just how they talk. They get excited about things.

I'm not sure why I wanted to share that, but I did. Ok, it's late, I'm tired, I have to run the dogs in the morning, so I'm going to bed. Love to you all.