Christmas Eve at Point Reyes

My mom just left yesterday morning.  She was only here for a few days (on the way back to Illinois after visiting my brother in Las Vegas), but on Christmas Eve, we drove up to Point Reyes, a lookout over the Pacific Ocean where there's apparently a really cool lighthouse (which we didn't venture out to see because it was too cold), and where you can do some whale watching if the whales are around and you're patient enough.  Even though it was a bit of a long drive, made longer by the fact that I missed a few turns on the way back, I think we both had a good time, and I got some nice pictures out of the deal too.

I think this is my favorite one.

Yesterday, for Christmas, we went to my friend Jess's house and consumed way too much cheese and butter and cream.  Well, I can't speak for everyone, but I definitely consumed way too much of those things.  I tell myself it may have been slightly offset by running 9 miles yesterday morning, but even if not... oh well.  I also told myself I would do 9 more miles today, but I seriously doubt that's going to happen, since I already ate more bread and cheese this morning, and it's cold and gray outside.  I think I'm going to walk the dogs, listen to This American Life, and do some errands instead.

Merry Christmas, everyone!  I hope you spent it surrounded by the people you love.

useless

If I had known how utterly useless my brain would be today, I would have spent the day watching Six Feet Under instead of trying to get reading done.  I can not concentrate on anything.  Criminy.

Now I have to walk the dogs before I head in to campus, because the final exam for the course I'm teaching is tonight, and I have to be in some random room from 7:00 to 10:00 pm.  Hopefully I'll at least be able to get some work done then, but I woke up with a gross head cold this morning, and now it's starting to come back, so my chances are looking somewhat slim.  Bleargh.

On the bright side, my dissertation prospectus was approved last week, and I'm getting ever closer to actually having a specific set of studies planned for my dissertation.  That means that the stressful part of this semester is over; now all I have to do is write two Portuguese compositions, take my Portuguese final tomorrow, and write two responses to articles from my psycholinguistics seminar.  The problem is that I have little to no motivation to do any of these things, and I just keep spacing out and taking breaks to play the piano.  Or nap.  Or eat toast.

Not the most productive day in recent memory.

Boston pictures, etc.

they slice feebly through the atmosphere,
at an angle far too steep for 3:00 pm:
these rays of fall sunshine that somehow
look so warm and feel so chilly, I mean

they skitter across the November grass
that grows in haphazard little rainy-season-clumps of lush green
I will never understand fall in California,
how it manages to feel something like fall after all

the rains are coming and I can smell it on the breeze
I will need that blanket and that cup of tea,
please,
I will need late night talks and staring out the window for a time
and I will need some silly jokes
and some long, long runs that numb my body and my mind

some friends and I decided that being an adult
is not what you thought it would be
you stay the same, and stay the same
but then you look back and realize that something surely must have changed
because this is not the same as that
and you didn't even know you were on a path from there to here

the thing is:
time will never cease to push you,
but you have to keep yourself facing forward
otherwise you get lost, or you move backward,
or you end up in the middle of nowhere

this time next year will suddenly feel like fall again
we can look at ourselves in the slanted sunlight
and try to decide how much we've changed
and which way we're going

things that make me happy

Here is a list of things that have made me happy today:

- Meeting with my undergrad phonetics students.  They're so bright and enthusiastic, and it makes me grateful to have them in my class, and grateful to have the opportunity to teach them and interact with them.

- Coming home at 4:30.  Because I can.

- Hot chocolate.

- Playing the piano for an hour.  Because I can.

- Greek yogurt with fig jam and almonds.  Holy cow, what a delicious discovery.

- Setting up a time to go running with friends on Saturday.  Friends - plural!  A group of 4 or 5 of us are doing a 6-miler on Saturday morning!

- Along those lines: planning the rest of my marathon training.  I don't even have to do my first 20-miler until mid-January, and I'll still be perfectly prepared.

- Persimmon season.

- Talking about going to Montreal this summer!  A plan has been hatched.  There may be a Chicago-Montreal road trip in the works...

- Having red hair again.  It was time.

It doesn't show up that great in this picture, but trust me.  It is great.

Napa Valley, here I come...

I just officially registered for the Napa Valley Marathon in March!

I'm so excited - it's been so long since I did a marathon!  I have just under 4 months to get ready, and I'm feeling really good about it.  I did a really nice and easy 10 miles or so yesterday (with my new running buddy! I finally got someone to run with me) and I feel great today.  Can't wait!

barreling through

it smells like rain and
maybe a new beginning
is this really fall?

*****

Oh my goodness, I am so excited about today.  I'm serious, I feel like there are endless possibilities, and they're all magnificently boring, and it's the greatest thing.  My plan is to get caught up on some of the most important things missing from my life for the past 3 weeks.  By this I mean: drinking tea, listening to NPR, playing the piano, going grocery shopping, cooking, taking a nap, watching Six Feet Under, doing laundry, and maybe even reading something that doesn't have to do with phonotactic probability.

I turned in an incomplete version of my dissertation prospectus yesterday.  I still have a lot to add to it, but the structure is there, and that's the most important part.  Now I'm taking the day off (mostly, probably).  It seems like everyone had a really rough week this week.  Thankfully I ran into F in the hallway yesterday around 5:00 (I was admittedly trying to run into him, by going by his office) and we booked it over to Jupiter for a beer.  I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say it was probably the greatest beer I've ever had.  We sat upstairs by the window, overlooking downtown Berkeley in the fall twilight, and munched on olives and mused on life.  After a while at Jupiter, we headed to the Albatross and met up with a small group of people who also had a rough week, and we somehow stayed out until 1:00 am or so.  We were a little haggard and pathetic, I think... it seemed like most of us were at least partially falling asleep at some point... but it was so nice to be with friends, laughing and not thinking or stressing about getting my paper done.  It's definitely close enough that I can take today and tomorrow off, I think.  Then I'll work on it all day Sunday and Monday, and it'll be done for real.  Done.

I had a glorious run in the rain just now.  Absolutely beautiful.  Not particularly far, but it was so nice to get out of the house, get some blood flowing, and just feel wonderfully, primally alive.  When I sit at my computer all week, reading and writing and thinking, I start to get antsy and dissatisfied.  People were not made for sitting at computers all day, and some part of my caveman brain knows that and gets grumpy if I suppress it for too long.  Anyway, I woke up around 7:15 this morning, because apparently I have accidentally retrained myself that hey, 5 1/2 hours of sleep is probably enough.  (It is not.  But I digress.)  And I just had to go.  So me and the dogs did a little loop up and around campus, and it started drizzling about a mile in, but it was this nice, soft, spring rain that makes everything smell fresh and dirt-y and new.  By "dirt-y", I mean it literally smells like soil, and I love that.  Then I came home and actually cooked myself breakfast and made some tea, instead of subsisting on coffee and baked goods, as I have been for about two weeks now.  I turned on NPR and sat down and ate my eggs and it was good.

You know what it is time for?  Piano.  And then a nice warm shower, and then lazing about in flannel pants and my Illinois hoodie, watching Six Feet Under until the rain lets up.  Then there will be groceries and listening to music and cooking, and (nearly) all will be right with the world.

delirious conversation with myself

me: You know what will be nice?

me: Lots of things, but I think I know which one you're referring to, me.

me: Yeah, I'm thinking about Thursday night when this dissertation prospectus is turned in.

me: True.  Actually, I was thinking about Friday morning, when you don't have to get up at 4:00 am and write about syllables.

me: You're right, me.  I'm not sure which one will be nicer.

me: You know, maybe you should go to bed, since it's only 8:40 pm and you're already typing up a conversation with yourself on your blog.

me: Yeah, probably.  Guess that Boston pictures post will have to wait until later this week.  Good night.

Correction: sunny and crisp, but still a little weird

I accidentally just ran 9 miles.  It turns out there are only so many bridges that cross the Charles River, so if you miss one, your run might end up longer than expected... but that's great!  I planned a route of about 8 miles, apparently missed a bridge somewhere, and instead wound up with 9 miles, which was just about perfect.  Napa Valley is coming up in exactly 4 months, so I'm feeling good about the fact that I can still do 9 miles perfectly comfortably.  There are some things I had kind of forgotten about marathon training though...

1) Running in the cold.  The first 1-2 miles are a little uncomfortable, but then you get nice and warmed up, and it feels fantastic.  45 degrees is perfect weather for shorts and a t-shirt, if you can believe it. ;)  After 5 or so more miles, though, it's like my body finds a new equilibrium and remembers that it's 45 degrees out.  So then I usually alternate between feeling perfect and being a little chilly for the last few miles.  If I'm going longer than 10 miles in the cold (which hasn't happened in several years, so I had forgotten this), I really have to wear running tights and/or a long sleeve shirt, though.  10 is about my limit in shorts and a t-shirt once the temperature starts dropping.

2) Chafing.  Ok, I didn't forget that chafing happens, but I sort of forgot the reality of chafing.  When you're starting to get a little tired and feeling like you'd like to be done running now, please, it's not much fun when some part of your body is getting raw from rubbing against some piece of clothing.  A reminder that Body Glide is your friend.

3) Getting ready for a marathon is all about training your legs to deal with the stress.  I never, ever have cardiovascular difficulties during longer runs; it's always my legs that do the complaining.  Today it was my left hamstring a little bit (because I ran a 5K in San Diego this week, and am still a little bit sore, embarrassingly) and then my right calf a tiny bit (probably because I was a little dehydrated).  Things I have learned about my musculature from running so much is that my hamstrings are perpetually tight, they only get more so unless I stretch a little bit, and if I don't stretch an adequate amount, I end up with a back spasm at some point.  I have also learned that my calves threaten to cramp up if I'm not hydrated enough.  And if I get really dehydrated, they do cramp, and that is mi-se-ra-ble.

Enough running talk.  You know, Boston is very nice.  I did my 9 miles up and down the Charles River, and it was quite pretty.  It still feels somewhat weird and foreign, and I can't really imagine living here, but the sun was shining and it was such a quintessentially fall day today that I found myself scooting along with a grin on my face.  The fall leaves are gorgeous, and the buildings are all red and brown brick, and I really like cities that have a river winding through them.  It's very Old World, in a very nice way.

Well.  I'm going to try to get some grading done before the plenary talk at 5:45, and I am going to sleep so well tonight.  (I slept great last night, too.  Now that I'm adjusted to the 3 hour difference, it's time to go back to the west coast.  At least I'll have the end of Daylight Saving Time helping me out on the way back.)  Tomorrow I've got a full morning of talks again, until 12:30.  Then I think I'll walk around Boston a bit and take some pictures before I catch my flight around 6:00 tomorrow night.  And the magic of time zones is such that I'll get back to San Francisco at 9:40 after a 6.5 hour flight.

And so I bid you adieu, until tomorrow when I'm killing time in an airport, most likely.

dark and cold and weird: part 2

I kick off my shoes


take off down the cold pavement


skin tingles and burns

**********

Maybe I should start all of my posts with a haiku describing an aspect of my day.

So, Boston is still dark and cold and weird, as far as I can tell, but I was in a building listening to conference talks for the part of the day when the sun was out, so I'm still reserving judgment.  You know what?  My conference talk seems to have gone really well.  A really kind lady came up to me afterwards and wanted to talk to me some more, and it turns out she's just finished a post-doc with THE bilingualism researcher, just started a job as a professor at Harvard, and studies bilingual brains with ERP and other brain-scanny equipment, and she wants to collaborate with me.  So I feel like that's got to be a good sign.  We're going to be in touch about a project she'd like to bring me in on, because she wants to look at babies' neural responses to nursery rhymes and she needs a phonetician.  Hooray for networking!

Other than that, man am I pooped.  I didn't get to sleep until almost 2:00 last night, because 2:00 EST is only 11:00 PST.  I had set my alarm for 6:00 this morning, but when it went off, it was clear that that was simply not happening.  So I hit the snooze alarm for nearly an hour and finally got out of bed around 7:00, which, come on, is still 4:00 am Pacific time.  (So... my normal wake up time these days.  Oy.)  I practiced my talk a bit this morning and gave it at 11:30, and everyone I talked to said I was a really strong presenter.  The Harvard lady said it was an extremely clear, logical, and easy to follow presentation, and that made me feel really good, because by the time I'm ready to present something to other people, I've been thinking about it for so long that I honestly can't tell which parts make sense any more.

Enough of that.  The Harvard lady actually bought me lunch, and we talked about all kinds of acquisitiony things, and then I went to some talks in the afternoon.  Got caught up with a friend from Berkeley who finished his PhD a few years back, chatted with him and my Stanford/France collaborator (who whom I had my ASA poster this week), and then me and aforementioned collaborator went and got hot chocolate.  I was trying to explain to this dear, sweet, innocent Californian friend of mine how the best part about winter is coming in to a toasty warm house when it's cold outside.  It's not that cold in Boston right now, by any means, but as we were sitting in Starbucks with our hot chocolate, I realized how nice and warm and cozy it was inside, and how that feeling is only truly soul-warmingly satisfying when you've been walking in the cold for a bit.  She tried to understand, but I think she really just wants to get back to California. :)

There was a plenary talk at 7:45 tonight, and there was a whole spread of delicious desserts afterwards, and that is a cruel trick to play on conference attendees, if I may say so.  I had to stay for the plenary talk, because the lady giving it is a big name in acquisition research, but my brain was shutting down a little bit.  I made it to the end, grabbed some awesome cake, and came back to where I'm staying.

On the way back, I had this nearly-uncontrollable urge to kick off my shoes and just run down the street.  I reined it in, but I was thinking about how good it is to have that stinging feeling from bare feet on cold concrete, and how sometimes you really need to just kick off your shoes and run down the street for no reason other than the fact that you can.  Instead, I walked quickly back and thought about how I'm going to go for a long, long run along the Charles River tomorrow, and how I wish I had thought to bring my running tights.  There's supposed to be a high of 50 degrees tomorrow, and I have a bunch of talks I should go to in the morning, so my plan is to eat a big breakfast and go for my run during the warmest part of the day, in the early afternoon, when I've digested but am not hungry again yet.  Then I can eat a big, late lunch, and hopefully hang on until tomorrow night, when there's another late plenary talk that I absolutely must see.

For now I have chamomile tea and nice warm pajamas waiting for me.  I will turn on some music and dance around while I brush my teeth, and then I will sleep and sleep and sleep before I do it all again tomorrow.

Boston is dark and cold and weird.

Ok, that's not fair at all.  I've only been here since it's been dark, and it's only cold because I'm staying in some lady's house and I don't want to turn the thermostat up too high.  I found this bed and breakfast on AirBnB, which I highly recommend if you're traveling somewhere and want to find a nice, homey place in your price range, but it turns out the place I'm staying has no one here until Saturday night.  The lady was super nice - she left me a key in a lockbox, the code for the internet, bagels and cream cheese and coffee for breakfast - but she also left her thermostat at 65 degrees and I'm not sure whether that's because she's been out of town for a while or she wants to save money.  But 65 degrees is kinda chilly in a drafty house in Boston.  So I just turned it up to 68 and I hope I don't cost her a fortune or anything.  I guess I'm paying to stay here, so I should be able to turn up the heat a little bit...?  (And isn't it a little weird that she just trusts people to come into her house and hang out while she's gone?  She seems really nice and normal, and I guess I probably seem nice and normal, but I don't think I would let strangers into my house when I'm not there.)

Anyway, another weird thing about Boston so far is that when we were flying in, the sun was setting over the land instead of the ocean, and that made me realize I've been living in California for long enough that it's weird to me when the sun sets on the opposite side of the horizon as the ocean.  Funny how new little normalcies creep into your life without you realizing it.

Another weird thing is that the people look different here.  It's subtle enough that it's not particularly alarming or anything (the majority of people look approximately the same in most places in the U.S., probably), but the predominant style is clearly somewhat different.  Far fewer hipsters, for one thing.  Much less plaid. A lot more tweed, and shoes that have actually been shined.  (Shoes that are actually shineable, in fact.)  More people who get their hair cut regularly.  Fewer tattoos.  I forgot that the "preppy" look existed, to tell you the truth.

So I'm not judging you yet, Boston, since I've only known you for about 5 hours, and pretty much all of that time was spent in the dark, on public transit, but I don't think I like you as much as the west coast, I gotta say.  I don't do well with uptight.

Speaking of uptight, I should probably get back to practicing my conference presentation.  It's at 11:30 in the morning and I want it to be over so I can enjoy the rest of this conference.  I also want to go for a long, long run, either on Saturday or Sunday morning, to work out some anxiety.  What a weird week!  I sit for a while, and then suddenly I'm in San Diego.  And then I sit for a while longer, and suddenly I'm on the exact opposite side of this huge country, on the east coast, where it actually looks and feels like November, which is simultaneously comforting and off-putting.  It's like, "oh right, seasons", but at the same time, it's like coming out of a time warp where you've been trapped in la-la land fog-and-sunshine cycles for some indeterminate amount of time.  And I also lost 3 hours today with the time change, so I keep looking at the clock and going, "what??" because I'm not even remotely tired.  I have no idea how I'm going to get to sleep.

Weirdness abounds, friends, weirdness abounds.

things that are funny in airports at 6:00 am

The best sign I have ever seen in an airport:

"SECURITY CHECK

NO JOKES, PLEASE"

Silly things have been making me giggle the past few days.  During one of the presentations I saw, this guy said, "I don't want to throw out the bathwater with the baby..." and it just struck me as really funny.  Something about the idea of wanting to chuck a baby, but definitely not wanting to lose the bathwater...

Anyway.  Not as funny: paying $8 for some yogurt and a house coffee.  It's not even a floofy espresso drink.  Or good yogurt.  :(

Well, that's that for the ASA, I guess!  I never did get to check out San Diego any more.  I went to talks on Tuesday morning, did reading and work on Tuesday afternoon, went to dinner with some people I don't know very well (but it was very nice), and hit the hotel hot tub before bed.  Wednesday, we had our poster presentation starting at 10:00, but people were already coming by and seeming interested at 8:30, so we just set up shop early and talked and talked and talked about it for 3 hours.  Everyone had nice things to say, for the most part, so that's always a good sign, I think.  I really like poster sessions, and the ASA is still my favorite conference so far.

Here's what this poster looked like, just for fun:

They're getting better with practice, I think.  (Do you see how we made our graphs look like little French flags??)

Then Wednesday afternoon I had a long lunch with some friends from Stanford and some other phonetician friends I've picked up along the way.  It was really fun in that supremely nerdy way that only other people who have something as ridiculous as phonetics as their chosen profession probably understand.  I intended to go to more talks Wednesday afternoon, but we missed the start of them because we were fleshing out our business model for a mall store that offers individualized napping space ($5 for the first 15 minutes, extra fee for someone who will wake you up forcefully; then it's $10/5 minutes after that).

So instead of seeing more talks (which I actually wanted to see!), I worked on my bibliography and tried to get more reading done, but it was one of those days where it takes you 2 hours to get through 18 pages.  Finally an old friend/acquaintance of mine called and we went and tossed a frisbee around for just a few minutes until it got dark.  I went back to the hotel and had dinner with someone I knew from the ASA meeting in Seattle last spring, then I did some more reading, spent too much time on Facebook, and hit the hot tub again.

I could seriously get used to having a hot tub around.  What a great way to wind down before bed.

And now it's 7:00 and I'm at the San Diego airport waiting to go to Newark.  I had completely forgotten that I have a connection in Newark, which means I'll be on my first flight from 8:00 PST to 4:30 EST, change planes in Newark, and then eventually get in to Boston at 6:15 tonight.  And somewhere in there I need to clean up my talk for tomorrow (yikes!) and it would be soooo nice if I could finish this bibliography.  I'm not really holding out for that, though.

I'm a little worried that I'm going to freeze in Boston.  The highs are in the 50s this weekend, but I've been living in California for long enough that I worry I've become soft.

Well, back to reading.  Much love to all, and you'll hear from me again in Boston!

San Diego (day 1)

I do this thing where I dread, dread, dread something, and then inevitably, once I sit down to actually do it, it's not nearly as bad as some silly part of me thought it would be.

(I planned out everything I have to get done on my dissertation prospectus bibliography this week, so now I'm allowed to show you some pictures of downtown San Diego.)

There are palm trees everywhere.  It's a little weird, but definitely less weird to me now than it would have been a few years ago, before I started living in Berkeley.

There was something really nifty about the light in the city today, and I'm not sure this picture gets it across.  The leaves are just starting to turn colors, and when the sunlight shines through them, with the backdrop of the bright blue sky, it's pretty magical.

"Welcome Acoustical Society of America".  That's my conference.  :)

One thing I really like about taking walks with my camera is that it automatically makes me tune in to the beauty in the world.  When you're scanning for a good shot, you see things in a different way.  And even if I don't always end up with lots of good shots, focusing my attention in that intensely visual way makes me appreciate the way the light reflects off of the buildings, the street, and the foliage, the banking of the sidewalk, the width of the street, the colors of the signs and storefronts, the way the whole scene looks totally different when there's a woman with sleeve tattoos playing with her toddler, or a delivery man balancing a dolly while he rings the bell, or an old couple walking their little dog.  I didn't get pictures of any of those things, but I saw them.  And I saw them, if you see what I mean.

I realized (or perhaps re-realized) today that one of my favorite things in the world is getting on a bus with an unknown destination.  And I mean that both very literally and as a metaphor for my life.  The lady at the front desk told me one way to get where I wanted to go, and it involved taking the #20 bus and transferring to the trolley at the transit plaza.  I waited for several minutes, and finally the #120 bus showed up.  I asked the driver if it would take me to the transit plaza, and he said no, but he could drop me off downtown.  So I got on, sat down, and waited to see where I would end up.  And I love that feeling.  I really live for the rush of excitement that comes from taking a plunge into the slightly-unknown.  It was so exhilarating to be heading somewhere but not really knowing where I was going or how I would get back, but that really, I would be fine.  I hopped off somewhere downtown and wandered around for a while, finally found the "historic gaslamp district", which was cute enough, and then eventually got hungry and ate an Aloha Dog from a hot dog stand, which is apparently a hot dog with pineapple, onion, and teriyaki sauce.  Then I came back to the hotel and planned out what I'm going to read and write this week, and here I am.

Unfortunately I never made it down by the water, so I don't have any pictures of the waterfront, but I might be able to get some in the coming days.  I'm here until Thursday morning, when I leave for Boston, and the landscape changes dramatically!

For now, though: reading and a snack and then another dip in the hot tub before I hit the hay.

giving myself permission

I am in beautiful, sunny, beautiful San Diego.  (I know I just described it as beautiful twice in the same sentence.)  I got in last night, went for a dip in the hotel hot tub, then went to sleep nice and early.  Woke up around 8:00 this morning, lazed around for a bit, got some breakfast at Starbucks, took a shower, and decided that I am not going to do any work right now.  I was going to start right in on editing my conference talk for Friday and working on my dissertation prospectus, but you know what?  It's beautiful here.  (Did I mention that?)  And I don't have any conference activities I absolutely have to attend today, so I'm going to go walk around San Diego with my camera.

Then I can come back early this evening, buckle down, and put my nose back to the grindstone.  But it's sunny and 70 degrees, and I finally got a good night's sleep, and I am giving myself permission to go wander around for a few hours.

I'll be back later, with pictures. :)

I'm only 27.

And yet I've apparently turned into one of those old people who wakes up at 4:00 am after about 5 hours of sleep.

I did not intend to get back on a schedule that includes waking up at 4:00 am every morning, but that seems to be the inevitable result of not being able to force myself to get work done after 6:00 pm.  I worked on stuff for nearly 14 hours straight yesterday (ok, maybe only 4:30 am to 6:00 pm), and then partially against my better judgment went out to my favorite bar in Berkeley and played Boggle.

And then I woke up at exactly 4:00 this morning (without setting an alarm for then, mind you) and laid in bed for 2.5 hours thinking about stuff.  And then I remembered that I had leftover pancake batter in the fridge and a Portuguese test today, and I obviously wasn't sleeping any more anyway, so here I am.  Pancakes and blogging at dawn, which is only 7:00 am these days.  (The end of Daylight Saving Time will be nice in that respect.)

I'm going to see the San Francisco Orchestra tonight, and I hope I can get a nap in before then.  If not, then I should be able to sleep in tomorrow and/or Sunday before I head to San Diego for a few days.

San Diego!  And Boston!  In 2 days!  Ooh, I should remember to pack my camera.

Here comes the sun, and I say, it's all right.  Time to start my day for real.

Some Sundays are pretty perfect.

I have no complaints about today.  I have few complaints in general, really, but today is pretty fantastic so far.  I had something like 20 people over last night for homemade deep dish pizza, and it was so fun.  I hope everyone else had a good time, because I had a really good time.  I love cooking for people, and I have the greatest friends in the world, and the pizza was pretty delicious, if I do say so myself.  The funniest part was probably that almost everyone who came brought a six-pack of beer, so the entire bottom half of our fridge was full of beer, but we worked our way through most of it over the course of about 6 hours.  And 5 pizzas!  5 of 'em!  Grad students are a hungry, beer-guzzling people, it turns out.  I was also really pleased that the dogs were overall quite well behaved.  A lot of the people here were dog people, so they seemed comfortable with them and were good about petting and patting them when they deserved it and telling them to get their noses away from the food when they deserved that, and the dogs were so happy to have so many people here.  I think a good time was had by all.

So despite all the revelry, I was really good about drinking lots of water, and I woke up feeling weirdly good this morning.  I did about 6.5 miles up in the hills yesterday, and we're playing frisbee this afternoon, so I didn't want to overdo it, but I felt better than I expected to, and I did a good, quick little 5.5 miles with the dogs this morning.  It is a gorgeous day out.  The sun is shining and there's a nice, cool breeze, and it's somehow beautifully warm and cool at the same time.

Now I'm home and I made myself some coffee and pancakes and I put on some new music I treated myself to - the weekend before last, after frisbee, one of my friends invited me to an impromptu concert thing in San Francisco.  And despite the fact that it was Sunday night I had plenty of things to do, I went anyway, and I was so glad I did.  So anyway, I bought the EP by the girl we saw, and it's really nice Sunday morning pancake music.  I don't think she was intending that, but it works.

I'm starting to get really pumped for Napa Valley.  This is almost certainly premature, because it's in a little over 5 months, but I'm starting to get really excited about marathon training again.  I didn't know if that would ever happen again, because after each marathon, I've been ready for a mental break from running for a while.  I love it, but those 4 hour runs really cut into your life.  The thing about a 4 hour run is that it's a whole mental journey.  The physical exhaustion only really kicks in for the last 2-3 miles or so.  It's making yourself head out the door when you know you're going to be gone for 4 hours, and making yourself keep going when you get kind of bored and tired of running, that's the hard part.  And after you've broken through the mental barrier of knowing perfectly well that you are capable of running 26.2 miles, you don't even really get the mental charge that comes from the accomplishment itself anymore.  It almost becomes a bit of a chore: "Aw man, I'm supposed to do another 20 miler this weekend," like "Aw man, I really need to tackle that pile of laundry."

Anyway, now that it's been over a year since my last marathon, I'm totally ready and anxious to do another one.  It's been a long time since I ran 20 miles, long enough that I miss it.  There's something so meditative about settling into a pace and just holding it for several hours.  Your mind drifts all over the place, and then you get to the end and it almost feels like waking up from some weird dream.  Running that far is definitely a completely different experience, physically and mentally, from normal everyday runs.  And I have to be in a certain mental space to actively want to do that, and I am suddenly feeling like I'm in that mental space again.

I think it must have to do with how busy I am this semester.  It's my whole momentum phenomenon; now that I'm back to doing a lot of school work all the time, I'm just feeling generally more hard-core and like running 20 miles is probably a good idea.

Also, I really want to go run through Napa.  It's going to be so gorgeous, and the idea of running through the countryside early in the morning is just so appealing to me right now.

Running, running, running.  I didn't think this post was going to be about that.  I thought it was going to be about how I'm leaving for San Diego and Boston a week from today and I'm not ready for either of those conferences quite yet, but in a way this post is about the fact that I'm in a very good place, mentally, right now.  I have a lot to do, but I feel really good about it, for the most part, even though I could easily be freaking out if I let myself.  It's a good feeling to be at a place in my life where I can think about all the stuff I have to get done and just be ready to buckle down and do it without worrying about whether/how it will get done.  It will get done.  And I will do it.  But I'm not going to worry about it in the meantime.

And so some Sundays are pretty perfect.  You wake up without an alarm clock, take your dogs for a run through the Berkeley hills, fix yourself some coffee and pancakes, listen to some lovely piano music, and then you plan the rest of your week before you head out for some frisbee with your friends. I can't really think of a much better day than that.

It's the Melinda show!

Sometimes I feel like Tuesday is the Melinda show.  I have to go teach for an hour, then I'm presenting a paper in my graduate phonetics seminar, and then I'm presenting a paper in my psycholinguistics seminar.

All of these things are good for me and I enjoy them, but it's just weird to be explaining things to people all day.  It simultaneously makes me feel somewhat competent and like a poseur.  ("Don't listen to me, I don't actually know what I'm talking about!")

Oh fall

you are beautiful and I will walk in you
until my feet are tired and wet and drooping
dragging/floating across the concrete sidewalk
like so many fallen leaves

I will clench my sweatshirt a bit tighter
and relish the long, slanted rays of your orange sunshine
I will drink hot chocolate with melty marshmallows
I will stay in bed for twelve extra minutes in my cold, California house

if I am very still, I will hear tiny droplets of water spraying against my roof
and I will miss thunderstorms
and still I will be sure that snow is just around the corner
and I will be wrong for yet another year

Oh fall
you are lovely and glowing,
a tinge of bittersweetness at the end of one season,
but hiding the smoldering promise of a new beginning
in the palm of your hand

a haiku from this morning

early morning run :


a childlike wonder before


the world is awake

******************

Unfortunately the childlike wonder has worn off and I need another cup of coffee to make it through my readings tonight.  This is what I get for having a fun weekend and getting no work done!

It is time.

It is time for another marathon.  It's been nearly a year now, and I'm getting antsy.  I'm also starting to think about the fact that I'm not going to be here that much longer, and there's at least one more race I told myself I'd do before I leave California:

Napa Valley.

I am going to run the Napa Valley Marathon in the spring.  Do you see that landscape?  I think this may be the perfect marathon for me, actually.  It's pretty rural, and I do so miss running through the countryside in the early morning peace and quiet with no one around.  It's got some rolling hills - enough to keep your legs working and help minimize cramping, but not enough to really slow you down. And at 3500 participants, it's not too big, not too small, but just right.  Enough people that you're never completely alone, but few enough that you're never trapped or figuring out how to maneuver and pass people in fanny packs.

So it's on.  I'm really gonna do it, and that gives me five months to get back in marathon shape, which is way more than enough.  (Actually about four months, since I'll have to reserve the last part of February for tapering, but that's still plenty, so I don't even have to start in seriously right away.)  I'll probably start adding in some 10-12 milers on the weekends in October and November, and then I can really start ramping it up starting in December.  The only thing that will be a drag is doing enough training if we have a wet rainy season this year, but I can handle it.

Napa Valley, here I come!

a list of things that are happening

I never know how to spell the word 'happening'.  I guess that's right, because my spell checker isn't underlining it, but doesn't it look wrong with two p's and then the one n?  I always want it to be 'happenning."  But nope, there goes the red spell check line.  And I guess it looks even more wrong like that, anyway.

I'm tired, but my cold is finally almost gone.  I've been sniffly for nearly three weeks now, and it hasn't been a lot of fun.  I've felt mostly fine all this time, but I've had a stuffy nose and a tickly throat for a while now.  I haven't been running since September 10th, in fact, and I know that because I've starting keeping track of my mileage again.  19 days without a run!  I don't even know the last time that happened.  Probably when we first moved here, over three years ago, and I was too claustrophobic to go running on the sidewalk.

I'm going to see Robert Plant tomorrow!  (Robert Plant!!)  Do you realize how amazing that is??  I'm leaving right after phonetics tomorrow, taking the train to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and seeing Robert Plant for free.  So cool.

I'm feeling guilty because I told my friend/research collaborator I would send her some stuff by today, and I still haven't sent it.  I'm trying to psych myself up to work on it, after I put it off a little bit more by making this blog post.

I have a Portuguese test tomorrow, which means I need to do my workbook exercises.  Portuguese is going really well.  I really love it, and I would love to stick with it to the point where I can actually speak it.  It's like Spanish + French + Russian, and I'm getting to the point now where I understand most of what my instructor says, and I'm even figuring out the phonetics enough to be able to pronounce it properly.  I still have a little bit of a hard time going from written Portuguese to the right pronunciation, because so many of the words are so similar to Spanish, so they automatically come out Spanish-sounding, which is pretty wrong.  But I'm getting there!

I'm about to drink my last cup of my favorite tea.  It was Trader Joe's winter seasonal blend from last year, and I'm hoping they get some more of it in soon.  It tastes kind of like Thin Mints, but not that chocolatey.

Did I mention I'm going to Portland in January?  I can't remember, but I'm really excited about it.  I got a paper accepted at a conference with my friend, based on the stuff we did in Paris over the summer, which is what I'm supposed to be working on right. now.

I had lunch with my friend from high school today (finally)!  It was so great.  We really need to do it more often.

This is turning into one of those semesters where I wish I could just fast forward to the end of it.  Or at least until I get these two conferences and my prospectus writing done, in mid November.  If I could skip forward to November 11th or so, that would be fine by me, I think.  But one certainly shouldn't spend one's life wishing for it to go by more quickly.  That's just plain silly.  So maybe I take it back, but I would like to wave a magic wand and have everything for the next two months prepared, if not presented.

It's almost my birthday.  I'm almost 27.  :D

Huck is barking because Rye stole his bone.  I think that's my cue to go regulate.  And then maybe I will force myself to do some work.

cozy sleepy day

It's raining!  I accidentally left the kitchen window cracked open over night last night, and now I'm sitting at the dining room table with a big bowl of delicious steaming coffee with a lip-smacking swirl of creamy milk in it, listening to the rain sprinkling against the pavement.  I can't believe it's raining!  September in Berkeley actually feels like September is supposed to feel, à mon avis, because it's this weird transition time between the dry season and the rainy season, and it's our Indian summer, so it's usually a mix of genuinely hot days and the usual chilly foggy days, and now we even have rain, so it's like... weather.  A little.  It's great.

Well, I updated my department webpage the other day and am rather proud of it, so I'm going to put a link to it here.  I'm supposed to go into one of our departmental professional development classes this week and talk to them about how I made my webpage, so I thought it would be nice to revamp it.  That, and I went to a meeting about "the academic job search" last week, and one of the more forthcoming (read: snarky) professors in our department was looking at people's webpages and CVs and critiquing them, and it made me think a lot more about the purpose an academic webpage is supposed to serve, which led to many changes.  I still have to finish updating my CV and put it up there, but I'm pretty happy with the format, anyway.

Yesterday was really fun.  So now that I have a piano, I proposed to my friend who had lent me his piano over the summer that we work on a duet together.  There are some really great classical piano duets out there, and that's one thing I've never really done before; the one time I played a duet was when my friend Laurie and I accompanied the school choir back in... 6th grade?... and the piano accompaniment was a duet.  We had such a blast practicing and playing it, and I've been having such a good time just being able to play again, so I thought it could only get better if I brought a friend in on the equation.  Playing music is great, but playing music with other people is even greater, and it's been so very long since I've done that.  So anyway, my friend came over yesterday and we worked on this piece (which has been stuck in my head for several days now) and it was really fun and a little goofy and I learned some new French vocabulary.  (French music vocabulary is just silly, in case you were wondering.)  It's weird to run through a duet for the first time, because you've been practicing the parts separately, and then you sit down to play it with someone else and it's really surprising and distracting.  Like, oh! that's how those parts fit together!  Really fun.

And then we went to a housewarming party for some other friends, and there was a cookout, and lots of good food and great people and a little too much drinking, and then I slept in until 10:30 (!) and woke up feeling like my cold was back full force, but now that I've got some water and some food and some coffee in my system, I feel okay.

(Another nice thing about having someone over yesterday is that I cleaned a little bit, which always makes everything feel nicer and homier!)

So, today.  Today I am not going to play frisbee, because it's raining and I don't feel that good anyway, so I think I'm going to grade some homework, maybe do some reading, and maybe finish knitting my current sweater project while I watch some Six Feet Under.

I've missed the rain.  What a lovely day.

time marches on

Oh my goodness, how is it the middle of September?  Oh my goodness, I'm going to be leaving for San Diego and Boston and needing to prepare a poster and a conference talk and turn in my prospectus-question-musings before I know it.  Oh my goodness, I have so much reading to do and I should be grading right now instead of blogging.

But oh! I have a piano again, and I can't stop playing it, and it suddenly feels like fall for some reason - despite that fact that it nearly always feels like fall here - but there's something about the light and the breeze and the (subtly changing) leaves that makes me just want to go for a stroll in my Illinois hoodie, drink some tea, and hang on to this fleeting "season" for a little longer.  I remember complaining to one of the older grad students when I first came here that there are no seasons to speak of, and she told me, "No no, we have seasons, they're just subtle."  I will still complain all the live long day that there are no seasons to speak of, but I also know what she was talking about now.  Something about the last week has started to feel like fall, which makes me think of how it's almost my birthday again, and I'm in my fourth year of grad school now (fourth!) and time just keeps marching on.

I ran into a very dear friend of mine from high school in the grocery store the other day (well, she ran into me, as I was trying to decide what kind of chocolate to buy) and it was so good to see her and we talked about how it's so silly that we don't get together more often, but it's partially a problem with time, and not with us.  We talk about getting together for lunch, and I know we both honestly intend to, but then we blink and six more months have gone by.  Oh, time, you silly thing.

Speaking of time, I finally got my haircut, after about four months that somehow flew by since the last time, and it feels so nice!  I would put up a picture, but I haven't taken a shower yet today, so it's kind of greasy and unimpressive right now. ;)

I suppose I should also mention that I taught my first sections of phonetics last week, and I had a really good time doing it!  It's funny, you just act like you know what you're doing, and people assume that you actually do.  I feel like that's a very useful life lesson to have learned.  I also think part of "knowing what you're doing" is convincing yourself that you do, in fact, know.  There I was, standing in front of a room full of undergraduate students, explaining how the vocal tract works and realizing that I do actually know a fair amount about that, and that most people don't, so in that case it wasn't too hard to fake it.  It's a little weird to hear yourself explaining things with some intellectual authority and seeing that people are writing down what you're saying, and may go back and study it later for a test on what you told them.  But I think they can sense my enthusiasm for the material, and so far, that seems to be keeping them somewhat engaged.  I hope that trend will continue.

Well, speaking of phonetics, I should grade some homework.  Happy Fall and much love to all.

new good thing +1

I got new glasses for the first time in about 5 years!  Yay!

What's funny is I wore my contacts to go pick them out, and even though I didn't have my old frames to compare at the time, I picked frames that are exactly the same shape as the glasses I've been wearing.  Like, exactly.  They look a little different, though, because they're plastic, so they don't have nose pads, they're a little thicker, and the color is a cool two-toned brown tortoise-shell with aqua blue on the inside.

Next up: haircut.

new good things

After reading Born to Run by Christopher McDougall (which is a really great read, whether you like running or not, but probably especially if you like running), I decided to cave and buy some Vibram FiveFingers shoes.  McDougall makes a really convincing (to me) argument that humans evolved to run mid-to-long distances, and they did it without all the fancy footwear we have today.  In fact, he presents a lot of scientific studies and statistics suggesting that running shoes tend to encourage bad running form, which ultimately results in more running related injuries.  The idea is that running shoes are so padded that you can run in them however you want and not feel the impact you should be feeling from your terrible form, so your biomechanics are sloppy and unnatural and it's bad on your body.

Anyway, I just picked these up at Any Mountain in Berkeley:

Vibram FiveFingers Bikila, the new model designed for running.

I know, they're totally goofy looking, but you know what?  They feel really good on my feet!  I've always loved walking around barefoot, and my favorite piece of footwear has long been a pair of flip flops, so it makes sense I would like these.  I'm planning to walk around in them for a week or so, play some frisbee in them and see how it goes, and then maybe I'll take them for a few quick spins around the block.  You're supposed to ease in to barefoot running very slowly, so I'll probably just add a few little one mile jaunts in these puppies to my normal mileage and see what happens.

Which brings me to another new good thing: we're playing frisbee at 3:00 today!!  Yay!  Lots of people said they're coming, and it'll be so fun to play again!  And the sun just came out, practically on cue for our game, so I'm getting really antsy and ready to run around!

In other New and Good news, our annual department meeting is tomorrow, classes are starting on Thursday, all of my friends are getting back into town so people are having "welcome back" get togethers, and I'm probably playing and singing at the Starry Plough open mic on Tuesday night with some friends.  This is a great week, and it's only Sunday!

2 out of 3 ain't bad

I got accepted to present a paper at the Boston University Conference on Language Development in early November!  In my acceptance email, they included the comments from the people who reviewed my abstract.

Anonymous Reviewer #1: "Very hard to understand results as they are reported.  Much more clarity needed."

Anonymous Reviewer #2: "Very clear."

Anonymous Reviewer #3: "Clear purpose, interesting result."

Weh-hell, I guess somebody got overruled.

Food

I've been hesitating a lot about whether to write this post, but I decided to just do it.  So here we go.

I love food.  I love food.  All kinds, really, and there's nothing I wouldn't try at least twice.  I say "twice" rather than "once" because there are plenty of things that after having tried them multiple times, they've really grown on me.  An example is the second big tub of yogurt I have in my fridge right now.  I got the first tub last week only because it was on sale - $2.99 for 16 oz. of full fat, plain and unsweetened whole milk yogurt from a local dairy, where the cows are actually raised and grazed in pastures.  Now, I love me some plain, full fat yogurt, but the first few bites of this stuff were too much for me.  It was very sour, and tasted more like a cow than I usually like my yogurt to taste.  I figured I wouldn't be able to finish the rest of the tub, but I stuck it back in the fridge anyway because I hate wasting food.

Over the next day or two, I tried it with a little sugar mixed in, and with a little sugar and vanilla mixed in, and with some strawberries and a dusting of sugar, and it just kept tasting better and better, until I was quite literally licking the tub empty before throwing it away.  I had to go back to the grocery store yesterday, and it was still on sale for $2.99 and I bought a second tub with no hesitation.

I love to eat, and I will eat anything, and I get great pleasure out of it.  I am also a great proponent of the adage "all things in moderation", and I'm generally pretty good about sticking to that.  The thing is, I regularly eat more fruits and vegetables than the average person, I think, but I also eat a lot of crap, because I love sweets.  This was a minor problem being in France, because while the fruits and vegetables are out of this world, so are the pastries and breads.  And cheeses.  And everything, really.  And when you're only there for a relatively short amount of time, it's very easy to convince yourself that you need to try a different pastry every day, because darn it, there are so many pastries to try!

The upshot of my time in France is that upon weighing in on my return - and I mean that in the literal sense - I had gained a good 10 pounds from where my weight usually is.  I will make a slight digression here and say that I used to be quite overweight.  Now, I will also say that I tend to carry weight fairly well, because I build muscle easily, so I think I usually weigh more than people might guess.  The most I ever weighed was probably in the 8th grade, when I topped out somewhere in the 170s.  And for a 5'3" female, it doesn't matter how much muscle you're carrying, 170+ is overweight.

When I transferred to Uni High, I worked really hard to get in good shape.  I've written about this before, but I started running and kept it up every day the summer before I started there, and I started actually paying attention to what I ate.  The weight came off pretty easily by just cutting out junk and watching my portion control, and over the course of about 5 months, I probably lost about 40 pounds.  That sounds like a lot, but that's exactly what it should be, now that I look back on it: 8 pounds a month is about 2 pounds a week, which is what doctors recommend, so yay for me.

Anyway, this was hard, because I got a lot of flak for it, to tell you the truth.  I felt great, and I was so healthy and eating really well, and people kept asking me if I had an eating disorder!  It was kind of unreal, because for the first time in my life, I was actually eating really well, and that's when everybody started scrutinizing my food intake.  But after I got my weight down around 130, I gradually quit paying attention to what I was eating, and my weight's been relatively stable ever since.  This is largely due to my running; as long as I put in some decent mileage every week, I can basically eat whatever I want (within reason), and I tend to stay somewhere between 128 and 135, which is within my healthy range.

Before I left for France this last time, I was creeping up towards 135, due to eating more and running less than usual.  I go through periods where this happens, so I wasn't really concerned about it.  A little bit of diligence and I would stop gaining weight.  Well, 6 weeks' worth of pastries later, I get home, step on the scale, and I'm at 142.  That was a bit of a shocker, actually!  I don't think I've weighed that much in at least 7 years, or maybe since high school when I first slimmed down.  The number doesn't lie.  Time to actually reign things back in.

So how to regain some control with my eating habits?  The "all things in moderation" thing clearly hasn't been working, because my idea of "moderation" has gotten far more lax over time.  "Moderation" had come to mean a treat every day, and the caloric toll of my treats has been increasing such that they're not actually very moderate anymore.  Add to this the fact that there's a fair bit of research coming out suggesting that bread products are probably pretty bad for us, and the fact that it makes intuitive sense (to me anyway) that our bodies are probably not designed to deal with the amount of sugar we throw at them.

At the same time, I do not like extremism.  I am not a fan of "diets".  I would never claim to be an "-an" or an "-ist" with regard to my food intake, because I think we should eat some of everything.  In moderation.

Except maybe bread products.  Maybe that does mess with our insulin response.  The idea has always made some sense to me, but I've always been too attached to bread products to test it out.  However, having gained a good 10 pounds in the past few months and somewhat gorged myself on breads and sweets for the months of June and July, I'm ready to let the pendulum swing back in the other direction and see what happens.

For this reason, I have decided not to eat any baked goods or other wheat products for at least one month.  I started last Friday, meaning I've completed 8.5 days of this experiment thus far, and I must say, it's going smashingly well.  I'm back down to 137 pounds already - so almost back into what I consider my healthy range - and I'm just not nearly as hungry as usual.  It's pretty amazing, actually.  I'm eating a ton of fruits, vegetables, eggs, and yogurt, and I'm feeling really good; I think my body is responding favorably to the higher fiber, lower sugar, and corresponding even blood sugar levels.  I'm already reaching the point where sweets and junk just don't sound very good anymore.  And I'm eating so much delicious food that I can feel really good about.  Here's what I remember eating yesterday:

scrambled eggs
mushrooms sautéed in butter
coffee
a mango
big bowl of blueberries and yogurt
several slices of watermelon
salad of chopped zucchini, tomato, avocado, butter beans, and parmesan cheese
few handfuls of nuts
iced coffee with milk, vanilla, and a sprinkle of sugar
salad of kale, red onion, dried cherries and cranberries, sunflower seeds
more watermelon
beef jerky
2 big mugs of tea (one red, one black)
large bowl of popcorn

The reason I decided to actually make this post is two-fold.  One is that if I write it down, actually putting it in a public forum where people can see it, I'm much more likely to stick by my resolution.  It's very tempting for me to keep it a secret that I'm not eating bread, because I generally think such resolutions are weird.  Because I don't subscribe to what I feel are arbitrary diet rules, it makes me somewhat embarrassed to be sticking by one, for once.  But I feel it's a worthwhile experiment, and I'd like to actually carry it through.  July 22nd was my first breadless day, so I'm going to keep going until at least August 22nd and re-evaluate once I get there whether I'd like to keep the experiment going.

The second reason is that I'm hoping people will be sympathetic, and maybe even supportive, if they know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.  I'm headed to Illinois next week (August 3 - 10), and I'm still not sure whether I'm entirely wedded to the idea of sticking by this thing while I'm there.  It'll be a challenge, and I really don't want to be That Person who appears to be looking for attention for their weird dietary practices and restrictions.  I hate That Person, I really do.  But at the same time, I'd like to challenge myself in this way, and see whether I can really stick by it.  So I'm going to try it and see what happens, and I hope people won't think that I'm being That Person, and I also hope I'll stick by my resolve to keep this experiment going despite my fear that people will think I'm being That Person.

I'm tired of talking about this (and I also need to quit typing and take a shower).  But let it be known, once and for all, that I do not have food issues, and that this is an experiment in regaining some self control when it comes to sweets, and also in just seeing what happens if I'm forced to replace the bread products in my life with more fruits, vegetables, and protein.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Well, it ain't no Sainte Chapelle...

... but I'm home.  :)

I've been meaning to post something saying I'm home for the past week (since I've been home for a week now), but I just haven't been feeling motivated.  Today, though, is the day.  I am home.  And it is time to post something.  So before I write anything else, I want to finish up with the Paris post that never made it out of the queue: pictures from my visit to the Sainte Chapelle with Karen.  They speak pretty well for themselves, so the only background information I'll offer is that it was constructed in the mid-13th century by Louis IX to house the Crown of Thorns (yes, like, the Crown of Thorns), but you can go to the Wikipedia link if you want to know more about what the Sainte Chapelle is.

Entrance to the lower chapel.  Yeah, seriously.

More lower chapel.  At some point I learned the vocabulary for all of the parts of a cathedral, but I've completely forgotten it now.  And I guess I learned it in French, so that wouldn't be much help anyway.

Inside the main part of the cathedral itself.  If you ever go to Paris, go here, and not to Notre Dame, for your cathedral experience.  While there are lots of tourists here, they're very quiet and respectful, whereas at Notre Dame they're incredibly loud and rude.

The rose window.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, this is the reliquary that houses the Crown of Thorns.  But don't take my word on that.

So that was the Sainte Chapelle.  I mean, do you see how hard it is to write a blog post about being back home after you've been hanging out in 13th century gothic cathedrals for 6 weeks?  'Cause that's what we do in Paris, just hang out in 13th century gothic cathedrals.

But seriously, it's very nice to be back, I just kind of don't know what to say about it.  It's amazing how quickly Paris seems so long ago.  And it's doubly weird that my friend and collaborator, who I was living with, is still there right now.  It really seems like it was ages and ages ago, and yet just last weekend, I was biking along the Canal and taking in all those Parisian smells.

One thing I will mention is what an amazing memory trigger the sense of smell is.  One of the first things that struck me when we got to Paris was the smell of the metro.  And I have no idea how to describe it, or what it is, and I can't even really remember what it smells like very well right now, but as soon as we got down into the metro, my brain was like, "PARIS.  YOU ARE IN PARIS."  It's not an especially strong smell, and definitely not an offensive odor or anything, it's just so particular, and it was so jarring to have that, of all things, come rushing back to me after so many years.

And then, as I was walking home to our house in Berkeley from the BART station last Monday night, the fruity-sweet smell of summer flowers wafted over me, and my brain went, "Mmmmm California.  You are in California."

Smells are so funny that way.

Well, the other thing I wanted to say is that I'm headed to Illinois next week, if you can believe it.  I wasn't originally planning to, after all this traveling, but fall semester is going to be crazy busy, so otherwise I wouldn't be able to make it back until Christmas, and that's a long time with no Illinois love.  So I'm flying in to Chicago on August 3rd, taking the train down to C-U on the 4th, hanging around until probably the 8th, then back up to Chicago for a little bit and flying back to Berkeley on the 10th.  Very quick little trip, but this way I get to go to my cousin's baby shower, and it'll be so nice to be in my Illinois home and see people, as always.

I think that's a wrap for now.  I'll try to write again relatively soon!

Paris Parks FAIL (sort of)

My goodness, how time has flown!  Gosh, I can't even remember what I've been doing over the past week that I haven't updated my blog.

Well, for one thing, I've got a bit of a project going that is related to my blog, but basically replaced the time I might have otherwise spent actually writing in it this past week.  So... more on that in a few weeks, I guess, but in the meantime I will just say that I have been having such a nice time in Paris and it seems like such a shame to leave, in a way.  I mean, I know I can't stay here forever, and it would obviously start to get old eventually, but I've just had such a great time!

So let's see... my last entry was from July 7th, what have I done since then?  Well, last weekend, the friends I'm staying with went on a little daylong excursion to a neighboring town, and I took the opportunity to go to a free jazz festival in one of the last big Parisian parks I hadn't visited yet.  I've knocked a good number of things off of my "Paris To-Do" list since I've been here, and I'm very pleased about that.  I did the Sainte Chappelle with Karen, Emily and I did the Grande Roue, and one other thing I always meant to do was to get out to see the Bois de Vincennes.  So the Bois de Boulogne is the big park that extends all along the western side of Paris, and it's where I used to go running a lot of the time when I lived here.  The Bois de Vincennes is the big park way on the opposite side of Paris, in the southeast corner (which is probably why I never got there), and there's a big castle and botanical gardens and all sorts of cool things to check out.  So since I had the day all to myself with nothing to do and there was a free jazz festival going on, I took the opportunity to sort of kill two birds with one stone and see the Bois de Vincennes and some free jazz.

The concert I saw was really great!  There was a jazz accordionist, if you can believe it, and he was incredibly talented.  They played some super cool music, and it was a really nice afternoon, and I was so glad I went.  I also had a fun little exchange with an older French dude, related to the fact that I had misunderstood how the public bike system works.  So, the public bikes.  They are so great.  But the thing is, you normally have to have a credit or debit card with this little chip on the front of it to be able to pay to use a bike.  In fact, all machines everywhere that accept cards in Paris basically require you to have a card with the chip.  And my impression is that all machines everywhere in the world except the U.S. require you to have this little chip thing, actually.  So it sucks as an American to have a hard time using your credit/debit card to pay for things.  It means you have to pay cash for everything, which means you have to keep going to the ATM, which means you wrack up an impressive number of bank fees pretty quickly.  (Except Emily told me that Bank of America has "partner banks" in most foreign countries, where you can use their ATMs without getting charged any fees, and it turns out BNP Paribas is my French bank.  That would have been really nice to know before I got charged like $30 in bank fees.  But I digress.)

Anyway, the Vélib' bike thing normally works by just inserting your bank card and getting charged a euro or whatever for the time you use the bike.  Unless you don't have a card you can use, in which case you can purchase a day pass or a week pass on their website, and they give you a little number you can type into the machines.  So that was really nice to figure that out, and we did that the first week we were here.  But it's 8€ a week to use the bikes, and it's only 29€ a year if you buy a special pass.  So heck, knowing I was going to be here like 6 weeks, it was totally worth it to buy the year long pass.  The thing is, I just assumed that in typing in my credit card information online to buy the pass, they would just keep my card info and charge me for however much I used the bike.  (The first 45 minutes of each ride are free, and beyond that it's 1€/hour.)  But no.  Of course not.  Silly me, this is France!

The point of the story is this: I was going to go for a very nice bike ride to explore the Bois de Vincennes after the jazz festival, and I went to use my year long pass and pick up a bike, and it wouldn't work.  As I was being unsuccessful at using my bike card, this guy comes up to me on a bike, and says, "Ah!  You're an angel!  I've been circling on this thing forever."  All of the bike lock ups were full, and he needed to turn in his bike so he would quit getting charged for it.  So I'm trying to get my bike card to work, and I say, "Well, I'm apparently not that blessed, because this is clearly not working."

So we go over to the little machine thing and I type in my number, and it says, "You currently owe 1€ before you can get a bike."  And he's like, "Oh, you just have to put more money on your account, no problem."  And I say, "No no, I have the year long pass, it should work."  And he says, "Yeah, but you still have to recharge it."  And I say, "You do??  What?  I apparently don't understand how this works."  And he says, jokingly, "What, you thought you could pay 1€ one time and just ride all over France however much you please?"  And I say, "Well, I gave them my credit card information, I thought they would just keep it on file and charge me for however much I use the bikes."  And he says, "What?  No, of course not, then you'd have to send in a form."

Dingdingding.  I had completely forgotten that whenever you want to authorize a regular deduction from your bank account in France, you have to send in a special form, with like, copies of your ID and signatures and blah-dee-blah.  So I'm like, "Oh right!  The form!  I totally forgot about the forms!"  And he says, "Well of course, you don't want places just charging you however much they please all the time."  And I kind of see the logic there, but being truly American at heart (apparently), convenience is a much higher priority to me than, say, financial security.  Man, whatever.  I would rather let the Vélib' people keep my credit card information and just charge me however much I owe rather than have to fill out paperwork and wait 4-6 weeks to be able to go for a 1€ bike ride.

Anyway, the guy says, "Well it's ok, you can just put your bank card in and add money to your account right now."  And I say, "No, I don't have the chip on my card."  And he says, "What do you mean you don't have a chip?  Of course you have a chip, everyone has a chip."  And I say, "No, it's an American card, we don't have the chip."  And he doesn't believe me, so I show him all of my cards, and sure enough, no chip!  He's flabbergasted, and totally tickled.  "Hehehe!" he says.  "For once we're ahead of you guys on something!  Vive la France!"  Which was pretty funny, because he was genuinely quite happy to learn that France's credit card technology surpasses ours.  And then after he finished laughing at me and gloating, he offered to use his card to give me the 1€ it would've cost to go for a bike ride, which was really extremely nice of him.  He insisted, too - I said, "No no, that's very kind of you, but it's ok."  And he said, "No, really, it's no problem at all!  It's just 1€!"  But I thanked him again and we went our separate ways.  I dunno, I think that whole interaction might have been more fun than the bike ride, anyway!

That was all on Sunday.  The rest of this week, we had a few subjects to test, and my French friend (whose piano is sitting all alone in my house right now) got into town, and we've been having a really nice time!  He got here on Wednesday and is staying with us until Sunday or so, so it's been great catching up and hearing about his crazy summer traveling and linguistic fieldwork.  He's been in a tiny little village in Chad for the past two months, which inevitably results in some interesting stories and gorgeous photographs, and I don't have to feel bad for making him sleep on the floor because hey, he has a mattress and a pillow and that's way better than a dirt/sand floor in a leaky tent.

Yesterday, the two of us met up with a friend of his and we walked around Paris all day.  All told, we did somewhere between 10 and 12 miles, including a trek up to the Sacré Coeur (the basilica we can see from our balcony) and getting mildly lost in a neighborhood where none of us had ever been before, resulting in a necessary, well-deserved, and delicious ice cream break, followed by lots more walking and a second break for coffee and French fries a few hours later, after we dropped his friend off.  You know, coffee and French fries doesn't sound like it would be particularly appetizing, but the coffee was a really nice pick-me-up, and the French fries were nice and salty and caloric, and it really kind of hit the spot at the time.

But that's when things got a little more complicated.  So, yesterday was Bastille Day, which is French Independence Day, and there was a big military parade and a big concert and a big fireworks display, and I had planned on going to see at least part of the concert and the fireworks with the friends I'm staying with.  The thing is, one of those friends isn't big on crowds, and I went to the Eiffel Tower for New Year's Eve the year I was here, and it was the biggest, rowdiest, craziest event involving a crowd that I've ever experienced, I think.  There were people chucking full bottles of champagne in the air, and it was really pretty insane and somewhat dangerous, and knowing that my friend doesn't like crowds, I thought it might be better to avoid all that stuff and go back to the Parc de Belleville (the park from my last post, with the gorgeous view) and watch the fireworks display from there.

But there was some sort of miscommunication along the way, or something, and so while Florian and I were enjoying our weird-but-necessary coffee and French fries, waiting to hear from my friends about what they wanted to do, it turns out they had already left for the Eiffel Tower without us.  This was totally fine, except that we had pretty much decided we would like to avoid the crazy crowds and that they would probably like to avoid the crazy crowds too if they realized what they were getting themselves into, so by the time they sent me a text message saying they had already left, it was kind of hard to figure out what to do and where to meet over text messages.  Eventually we decided to meet at the metro station close to the Parc de Belleville, but I couldn't tell if they actually wanted to do that or were just being polite, and it took way longer to walk up there than I thought, so they were waiting for us at the metro for a really long time, and I felt bad about that, and then it turned out that everyone else in the northeast quadrant of Paris was trying to see the fireworks from that park too, and we couldn't see a darn thing.  I would've been okay with that, except that then I felt bad that I inadvertently made them miss the fireworks, basically.  So, Parc de Belleville FAIL.

But today is good so far.  I just had a delicious lunch with lots of veggies, which was really nice after my day of ice cream, coffee and French fries, and kebabs for dinner.  Don't get me wrong, all of those things are absolutely delicious, but sometimes a girl needs some greens.  I think I'm going to go by the store and pick up some goodies to bring home to people in the U.S., and I might be going all-in on the non-native speaker thing tonight and going to a party with a bunch of French people.  My brain usually protests for a few minutes ("Aaaack!  What??  Hang on!!") but it doesn't take too long until I don't have to concentrate anymore and can relax and just let the words wash over me.  Yesterday was a nice reminder that it really doesn't take too long to switch language gears, and that I am in fact still capable of doing it!

Well, this is a long post, and I think it's time to wrap it up now.  Thus begins my last weekend in Paris for a while, so I probably won't post again until I'm home in Berkeley, which will be Monday night!  It's been so great, but it'll nice to be back in California and start to get back into the swing of real life.  (Finally.)  Signing off!