Darling Ukulele

I heart the homosexual agenda

2007-04-25T01:53:00.000+02:00

First, something I borrowed, full text and all, from le gai savoir:

Here's another chance to tip the scales of this VERY HOMOPHOBIC group's own survey. The AFA (American Family Association) is expecting an overwhelming majority of respondents to say that they would be 'less likely' to do business with a company if they knew it supported the "homosexual agenda" - whatever that is. So far, they are getting the results they seek. Of course, they are only sending it where they will get the expected results. Let's change the outcome by completing the 1-question survey and sending it to everyone we know who is tired of this archaic and hateful way of thinking. Follow the link below to take action on this important issue :

http://www.afa.net/petitions/businesses/businesses.asp

Next, this thing is entertaining. Sort of. Well, it's entertaining when you don't want to do your work. The fact that I took the time to explain my image choices is evidence of just how much I don't want to do my work.

Read my VisualDNA™

What I'm working on

2007-04-16T18:16:00.000+02:00

Because I've got nothin'.... Here's the thing I'm writing right now. It's a paper for a conference (in three days, but let's not talk about that). I manage to brutalize both Adorno and Martha Stewart at the same time, which is something, right?

I would like to start with an epigraph from Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia. In the vignette titled “Refuge for the Homeless,” Adorno claims, “The predicament of private life today is shown by its arena. Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. The traditional residences we grew up in have grown intolerable: each trait of comfort in them is paid for with a betrayal of knowledge, each vestige of shelter with the musty pact of family interests….It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” (38). Here, Adorno not only characterizes modernity as an alteration in the relationship of the home to the world. He also suggests that the impossibility of dwelling—the failure of home—is produced in part by knowing too much—“a betrayal of knowledge.” The implication is that a house can only function as a home to the extent that its political and emotional economy remains undisclosed. Once we are aware of the “musty pact of family interests” sheltered by the home, then comfort, and hence dwelling, becomes impossible.

Adorno’s argument makes me think about contemporary pop cultural dealings with the domestic, particularly those taking place in queer culture. It seems as though a straightforward and earnest relationship to the domestic is not only unfashionable but also irresponsible. If we want to cultivate domesticity or practice the fine art of home economics, it has to be done ironically. This is practically an injunction: if you are going to do that kind of domesticity—the cake-baking, apron-wearing, highball-drinking kind—you’d better not mean it. Nearly everyone I know loves Martha Stewart, but they claim to do so with irony. You know…they don’t really love her, not with serious intention (although this changed somewhat after her arrest—it became easier to love her in earnest). Instead, they love her because of her overblown, impossible striving for the domestic ideal. Martha Stewart is living camp, and our inevitable failure at being her—her inevitable failure at being herself, in fact—provide us with the space for doing domesticity ironically. The problem is…I don’t really know what this means on the ground…or, in the house, as it were. How does one practice the tasks of quotidian domesticity with irony? The popular domestic irony I’m talking about now seems largely aesthetic. What would it mean to cultivate an emotionally or intellectually ironic domesticity? Is this—whatever “this” looks like—what Adorno had in mind when he suggested that ethically, we’re better off not being at home in our homes?

I'm a modern girl*

2007-04-04T06:36:00.000+02:00

Check out the following from Urban Dictionary:

Modern

Descriptive of the increasingly large number of people who do not conform to the traditional values of man + woman = ok. Modern People tend towards being attracted to their own sex, or even both, in which case they are considered to be Thoroughly Modern People.

Symptoms of Modernity include overly tight/baggy clothes (boys/girls respectively), visible underwear, and publically being amorous with a member of the same sex.

Term was initially invented in the Birmingham area of the UK as a means of talking about suspected Modern People in close proximity without the subjects being aware of what was being discussed. Its growing popularity is rendering it useless in this regard.

See also: Modern People, Special Friends, or the short forms MP and SF

person A: modern alert!
person B: where?
person A: over yonder *points*
person B: haha modern as fuck mate

I had no idea. Did you?

Funnier, I learned this while preparing the first lecture for the class I'm teaching this quarter: Modern Pleasures. I couldn't have manipulated the rhetoric better if I tried.

*well, modern except for that baggy clothing clause. i don't do baggy.

Things I Learned This Week

2007-04-02T17:18:00.000+02:00

I'm back from the whole NYC-Oakland jaunt with Mr. Darling. Getting to share space again felt really good--with all the long, late-night conversations and cozy knitting and bad tv watching--and we also had good food and the theater and I found time to drop into Purl (even though there wasn't enough time for just about everything else). We also remembered that we are good at hard stuff. The remarkable solidity and the elegant integrity (in the architectural sense) of our relationship make all the inevitable tender rattles so much less....rattling.

Last night I watched Jesus Camp. Watch. This. Movie. It's totally fascinating and terrifying all at the same time. I was struck by how much agency evangelical kids get to claim. The children in this movie are more articulate and self-possessed than most of the kids I know. When I was a little girl, I started a club. Its mission was to overthrow adult rule. (I'm not kidding. Yeah. I know.) My sister and I were the only members, and we created new rules for driving that put kids behind the wheel, we lobbied my parents to use the term "kidsitter" because "babysitter" was demeaning, and we created "kids' coffee" because we weren't allowed to drink coffee. It tasted totally disgusting, but it was the principle of access that mattered to us. As I watched Jesus Camp, I realized that if evangelical Christians had approached me at age eight, I would have bought into the whole thing. All that authority--the experience of adults appearing to value my thoughts and opinions--would have been so appealing to me.

The springing of spring.

2007-03-21T18:11:00.000+01:00

I can't believe I'm missing the whole Yarn Harlot represent weekend! And I'm arriving in NYC just a few days later. I might have to go on a belated yarn crawl by myself. Unless....pony? yarn? crawling? or maybe just a few hours at purl soho?

More than yarn, I want to buy springtime fabric for a skirt. I'm imagining a 50's style skirt: layers of full, gathered fabric finished with a top layer that isn't gathered itself, creating a casual hoopskirt effect. With little patch pockets and an inch-wide tape waistline that ties on the side. In good spring and summer fabric. Something like this. or this. or maybe this.

I'll be in New York with Mr. Darling this sunday through thursday, and then in Oakland thursday through next sunday. Do you want to have coffee with me? (Yes, I mean you.)

A list of things I could be doing right now*

2007-03-21T04:43:00.000+01:00

1. Grading any of the 20 exams I need to grade.
2. Figuring out the participation grades for all of my students so that, when I finally complete task one, the final grades will be practically done.
3. Cleaning my room.
4. Sorting my eye shadow so that I can actually find it.
5. Finishing the jaywalker socks for Mr. Darling.
6. Reading one of the five books I need to read in order to start writing my chapter on Jane Bowles.
7. Revising my section of the femme paper. You know, the one for the conference in two weeks?
8. Finalizing my syllabus for next quarter.
9. Reading and preparing lesson plans for next quarter.
10. Cleaning out my file drawer.
11. Reorganizing the kitchen cabinets, which drive my crazy.
12. Beginning to write the story that I've been brewing for months.
13. Spinning and plying the last little bit of olive and yellow and red roving from A Mano. The rest is patiently waiting, all wrapped around the spindle.
14. Starting to spin the gorgeous dove grey tencel blend. On my new (to me) Louet S10.
15. Researching the thing I have in mind for Mr. Darling's birthday gift.
16. Cleaning out the cat's litter box.
17. Reading Stefanie Japel's Fitted Knits, which I finally bought today.
18. Finishing the two sweaters that are sitting on needles in my UFO bin.
19. Admitting that they are not, in fact, in a UFO bin because I am not organized enough to have one of those.
20. After completing step 19, gathering all the bags of yarn and half-finished objects wedged into my bookcases and creating a UFO bin.
21. Starting the skirt I want to sew.

Instead of working on any of these worthy and long-overdue tasks, I am posting this entry and watching old episodes of Six Feet Under.

*in no particular order

I never learn.

2007-03-17T18:30:00.000+01:00

This is what my cats did last night:

Which is why I'm doing this today:
This has happened so many times, and yet I still leave my sock project in my bag. And my cats know exactly where to find it, and also that no one is awake to wield a spray bottle at 4:00 a.m. That's Grumperina's Jaywalker sock hanging out in the middle of my swift.
I love the way the pattern looks in this color Koigu (though it's hard to see in this blurry picture--sorry!). The yarn changes color depending on the light---sometimes it's brown, sometimes eggplant, sometimes charcoal--and the variegated parts of the solid create stripes that are perpendicular to the bias stitch pattern (thanks to pony for noticing that!). Now I just have to figure out how to untangle all that yarn. Boo.

Those pictures I promised 6 months ago...

2007-03-17T05:54:00.000+01:00

...are finally here, along with a few extras.

First, gertie

and pablo. They live up to their namesakes.

The quilt that I almost finished in December, and only really finished tonight.

It's Denise Schmidt's beach quilt, rendered way sloppier and tied rather than really for reals quilted. You need time, energy, and sewing skills to actually quilt stuff. Right now, I possess none of the above.

In between starting the quilt and finishing it, I went to Mexico with Mr. Darling. We saw Mayan ruins.

We slept in a bed with mosquito netting hanging around it (and even though I know there are very practical reasons for that, it also felt totally sappy romantic and I loved it).

We sometimes moved to the other bed. You know...the extra special beach-side bed.

Lockdown in the Ivory Tower (that chain letter thing)

2006-11-30T18:23:00.000+01:00

So it's been a few months. I know. But I moved to Highland Park, acquired the kitten-sized versions of Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein (hereafter known as Pablo and Gertie), started knitting lace socks like crazy, started learning to spin, and met a really amazing someone. And, oh yeah, there's that dissertation thing too.

Pictures of the knitting and the kittens to follow; my camera is broken. (It turns out that the absence of pictures makes for a kind of boring blog entry. Blogging is often so much more visual than verbal.)

I was inspired to blog again by a strange small world kind of coincidence. One of the graduate students in my department has a blog. I generally don't read it, mostly because I only read knitblogs and the blogs of close friends. Anyway, this morning I was making my daily round of the knitblogs and, lo and behold, there was a link to fellow grad student's blog. He's giving a paper at MLA on rate of transmission and blogs. Or something. It appears that graduate school has found my fiber-lined electronic haven. Even if I avoid academia in the blogosphere, I can't escape it. The university--my university, no less--will hunt me down and rustle me out of my dissertation-avoidant copse. (Not that I'm personalizing something that has nothing to do with me or projecting my own work anxiety onto an unrelated blog entry. Nope. I would never do that.)

So I guess that I'm participating in this little project (which requires that you mention it, link to it, and then ping technorati). It seems obvious (to me) that I should do my part, given that knitblogging apparently baffles people who study blogs (because knitters don't fit the generic blogger profile) and academic blogging is sometimes understood as a whole other continent in the blogosphere (which is totally inaccurate, in my experience---many, many knitting academic bloggers who are happily marrying the two genres), and I am a knitter and an academic and a person who blogs occasionally, mostly about neither knitting nor academia.

Back to Two Serious Ladies and sock-knitting. I'm working on Hedera right now.

It's ok to be gay!

2006-09-30T16:20:00.000+02:00

It's practically a youtube-stravaganza around here, but i can't help it. this is hysterical and really, really catchy.

Think of this as an allegory for my current state of affairs

2006-09-27T17:52:00.000+02:00

I have been accused of being a blog-tease. And what can I say? It's true. Actually, there hasn't even been very much teasing. Just straight-forward neglect. There are reasons for this, but they are boring.

The only thing in my life not suffering from neglect is my knitting. There are reasons for this as well, and they are deftly illustrated in this video:

Obsessive desperation. And, in my case, book review avoidance.

A smattering of things...

2006-08-29T23:30:00.000+02:00

...or my attempt to return to the blog-able world. That always means a list.

1. Last week, someone told me that I was like one of those Arabian race horses who has had cocaine shoved up its ass. She added that they were beautiful animals, but still....

2. A few weeks ago, while femme-ing it up in San Francisco, I lost my amber ring. Losing things is, for me, commonplace (watch as I fail to resist my overwhelming urge to allude to "One Art" here). This loss, however, feels exceptional because I have managed to lose and then recover that ring so many times in the past: I leave it on a planter at the university, a student goes out of his way to find its owner; I dump it carelessly in my handbag, it refuses to fall out; I leave it next to a variety of bathroom and kitchen sinks and it consistently finds its way back to me; I wash it with my laundry and, unlike my underwear, it always comes home. This time, though, the loss seems to be definitive. For some reason, the ring was all tied up with my conception of my own femininity (primarily because Not Dainty---you can say many things about me, but "dainty" is not one of them), and I cannot help feeling all melodramatic and attributing weird transitional significance to its disappearance.

3. Can you believe that Pluto is no longer a planet? I'm shocked. The wikipedia article about it uses the term "trans-Neptunian objects." I am committed to discovering more about trans-Neptunian objects just so I can use that phrase more often.

4. I quilted something! Check it out:It may not look like much, but that represents long hours of labor at my new sewing machine.

5. And I did some of the (complicated, for me anyway) finishing on Betty. See?Again, the uninvested eye might be unimpressed, but that is my first machine-basted ruffle. And the first time I have sewn little slidey strap-adjusting things into place. And it's good enough that I didn't have to take it apart, which is just enough encouragement to forge ahead with this whole learning-to-sew project. (More on that soon: turns out that knitting is forgiving of clumsiness, laziness, and a chaotic failure to attend to detail in a way that sewing will never be. All of this means that sewing is a stern mistress for me, clearly.)

I am alive. Almost.

2006-08-17T03:11:00.000+02:00

I am back in California, reeling from two weeks of travel (across the midwest, no less; hello, Ohio), my first pair of toe-up socks, and all the amazing people I met at Femme 2006. Full updates to recommence soon.

The fiber arts are my refuge from stress

2006-07-28T15:21:00.000+02:00

Look at what I made! It is the Lucky Charm handkerchief, now finished and complete with the name of its soon-to-be owner, for whom it is both a birthday gift and a bon voyage gift.

(the attempt-at-artistic-composition picture)

This handkerchief, dear Ponyboy, is guaranteed to provide you with protection from the effects of any broken mirrors, ladders under which you walk, or toasts made without the requisite eye contact. Although its ability to minimize turbulence during international air travel is still being tested, I offer my personal promise that it will, at the very least, make you smile and ensure that you get your bad airplane food from a friendly flight attendant. (And I'll give you another hankie should you need to actually use one; unfortunately, satin stitch is not all that absorbent.)

My Insides

2006-07-26T19:39:00.000+02:00

In order to get a carte de sejour, a.k.a. a residency permit, in France, it's necessary to have a medical exam. During the exam, they take a chest x-ray to make sure that you don't have tuberculosis. And then...they give you the x-ray. To take home. To keep for your very own. No joke.

The official document that goes with it says something about how it will be valuable to have the x-ray for comparison with future chest x-rays. I, like almost every other American I know in Paris, kept mine not for any potential medical value but rather as a souvenir. It's just so novel; you don't get to take your x-rays home with you in the states. (At least I've never gotten to. If someone out there knows of a doctor in California who lets you keep your x-rays, please tell me so I can transfer to her practice immediately.) Anyway, now I have this nifty black-and-white portrait of my lungs circa October 5, 2005:
I decided to take pictures of it, first, because I found it while I was cleaning (in preparation for tomorrow's move-out inventory with my landlord) and it was way more fun to photograph my x-ray than to scrub the bathroom; second, because x-rays fade and I wanted to ensure that I will have an image of my lungs to manipulate for years to come; and third, so that I could post them here, of course. Part of me wants to start waxing metaphorical and poetic and stuff about x-rays and insides and leaving places and all that. But I'm not going to. I'm even resisting the really strong urge, produced by the picture down there, to go on and on about spaces and buildings and bodies.
Seriously. My lungs and my rib cage set against the backdrop of my home for the last year. If I were a different kind of intellectual femme (the kind who actually reads books or writes my dissertation, for example) I would whip out Heidegger's "Building Dwelling Thinking" and go to town. Instead I'll just gesture at it in that irritating way that pseudo-academics have of gesturing at theory.

I just recalled that I also have a French sonogram of my uterus but I already packed it up and sent it back to California. Too bad, because pictures of my lungs and my uterus would have been something to behold.

I. Am. Cranky. (also I. Am. Suggestible.) (or Deep Thoughts about James Blunt and Being Put on Hold)

2006-07-22T15:35:00.000+02:00

As I write I am on hold waiting to speak to a "travel help advisor" at STA travel. (A word of advice: if you are planning to travel to or from France in August, don't buy plane tickets from STA. Not unless you are absolutely 100% certain that you won't need to change them. Which sort of defeats the purpose of buying tickets from them to begin with.) Anyway, while you are on hold with STA they play this kind of sensitive pop music. In L.A. it's the stuff that they would play on KROQ. The kind of music that I don't always hate but that I also generally don't listen to voluntarily and usually end up hearing only in semi-institutional settings (grocery stores, H&M, STA's hold line). Even though it is not music I am at all attached to or have any emotional history with, this sort of listener-friendly plaintive pop never fails to make me all moody and pensive. For example: I went through a whole period of time where I refused to go into one grocery store in my neighborhood because the (emotionally manipulative, I say) music rendered me absolutely helpless and I would end up wandering aimlessly through the store on the brink of tears. Granted, this was partially circumstantial (I'm never the most well-directed person in a grocery store, I was mere weeks away from my PhD qualifying exams, and my relationship at the time was showing unmistakable signs of disintegration), but I blamed the bad pop songs.

Just now we (me and all those people at STA) were listening to James Blunt's "Goodbye My Lover" (I had to google the lyrics to find out what it was because I live under a rock that shields me from 75% of pop culture). And I found myself staring contemplatively out of my window, feeling sort of sad. And then the person at STA was cranky and short with me when I explained that I was feeling frustrated with the lack of options available to me (and I stuck to "I" statements and stayed very calm and I realize that it is not my travel advisor's fault, so I feel even more frustrated since all of my emotional labor added up to someone being cranky with me).

Now, released from both James Blunt and the unhappy travel helpers at STA, and also from any hope of getting to keep that ticket for use at a later date, all I can do is wonder why I am so susceptible to James Blunt et al. It is the same thing that makes me cry at the end of "feel good" movies, even when they are Disney productions (I feel shame about this and cannot believe that I am confessing it here). I think that Butler, or maybe Foucault via Butler, would say that it is the insidious seductive quality of the regulatory norm, manifest here as the "average emotional response." The successful manipulation accomplished by "Goodbye My Lover" and Lilo and Stitch produces a collective emotional register. Belonging to this community of sentiment offers the illusory experience of having one's emotional responses affirmed and mirrored; it is empathy once-removed, automated, and mass-marketed.

(Oh. I can't believe I just attempted to use Butler and Foucault to process my shame about responding to the sentimentality of pop culture. Now there is something that deserves analysis: intellectual elitism and the [my] production of pop cultural shame.)

your regularly scheduled self-absorption has been cancelled...

2006-07-20T20:37:00.000+02:00

There's a manifestation in solidarity with Lebanon in Paris on July 29th, and rassemblements everyday at Trocadero from 18h-21h.

femmes fatales, femininity, cake

2006-07-19T22:47:00.000+02:00

Stein, once again:

Mabel Dodge who was present, said, but Berenson, you must remember that art is inevitable. That, said Berenson recovering himself, you understand, you being yourself a femme fatale.

From To Kill a Mockingbird:

Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

[Edit: Thanks to Sir Casper Potemkin for calling my attention to the Harper Lee passage. And for being attentive enough to my femininity to note that it shares a certain aesthetic sensibility with iced pastries.]

From the Cinémathèque Française:

Marie-Antoinette:

The beginning of the sentimental posts that obscurely reference departure

2006-07-16T13:28:00.000+02:00

Gertrude Stein on Alice B. Toklas on embroidering Picasso:

Picasso had just written to Gertrude Stein announcing his marriage to a jeune fille, a real young lady, and he had sent Gertrude Stein a wedding present of a lovely little painting and a photograph of a painting of his wife.
That lovely little painting he copied for me many years later on tapestry canvas and I embroidered it and that was the beginning of my tapestrying. I did not think it possible to ask him to draw me something to work but when I told Gertrude Stein she said, alright, I'll manage. And so one day when he was at the house she said, Pablo, Alice wants to make a tapestry of that little picture and I said I would trace it for her. He looked at her with kindly contempt, if it is done by anybody, he said, it will be done by me. Well, said Gertrude Stein, producing a piece of tapestry canvas, go to it, and he did. And I have been making tapestry of his drawings ever since and they are very successful and go marvellously with old chairs. I have done two small Louis fifteenth chairs in this way. He is kind enough now to make me drawings on my working canvas and to colour them for me.

Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is one of my favorite books. It communicates desire and intimacy through the small details of banal daily life, and also reveals the minute subversions that make the quotidian so interesting. Like taking the drawings of Picasso (that most public and virile of artists) and remaking them as the raw materials for a profoundly domestic labor and as the perfect ornamental flourish for your Louis XV chairs.

There is something about Toklas' tapestrying of Picasso's designs that captures the impulse behind my own fascination with the fiber arts (and perhaps domesticity as well?). My embroidery was not designed by Picasso and I do not have a Louis XV chair in need of upholstering (or a Louis XV chair at all). In fact, now that I look at the photograph, my design may not even be legible (it's a horseshoe). Regardless, I find a unique satisfaction in my embroidered hankies. This will be the Lucky Charm Hankie, with another horseshoe and a few four-leaf clovers, and there is a part of me that believes that it will offer a little bit of trans-Atlantic-voyage protection to its bearer. Valuable, even if the protection is founded purely on sentimentality.

"Happy Bastille Day!" or "Taking Orders from Clowns: A Primer"

2006-07-15T13:47:00.000+02:00

Yesterday was Bastille Day, a.k.a. le 14 juillet, which is the annual commemoration of the 1790 Fête de la Fédération--the one-year anniversary of the storming of the Bastille (hence Bastille Day, even though no one here actually calls it that). Anyway, le 14 juillet is the French equivalent of the 4th of July. That's really all you need to know.

As you might expect, there is a big parade at the Champs-Elysées, complete with the gendarmes and the pompiers and the whole nine yards. I skipped that parade (it started at 9:30 am--I won't leave my house that early even for people I like, let alone the French military), but heard rumors of an alternative parade being held at a far more neighborly hour by la Brigade Activiste des Clowns (in French, clown is pronounced "clune"). La BAC is an international pacifist organization which also does local lefty political stuff in Paris. So I decided to go check out the clowns. I took my camera. I anticipated an afternoon of picture-taking with activist clowns and parade-watching. I love a good parade. Maybe, I thought to myself as I headed toward the Tuileries, they will even have some extra clown noses.

Right.
I ended up wearing this. And riding this horse (isn't he fervent- and revolutionary-looking?):
This is the rest of my brigade (note our stylish headgear and vibrant color scheme):
In brief, I spent Bastille Day riding a broomstick horse throught the streets of Paris as a member of the French Clown Mounties.

Yeah. I'm not quite sure how that happened, either.

It was this "engagez-vous" sign that started to make me and my sans-costume picture-taking feel like voyeurism-in-the-bad-way.
So when I noticed that they did, indeed, have some extra clown noses, I decided that I would go put one on as a sign of my engagedness-in-spirit, if not in-body. But then the nose-distributor directed me to select a batallion, adorn myself appropriately, and then proceed to the make-up station on the right. And just as I was about to stammer an excuse about needing sunscreen or leaving the gas on in my apartment, I spotted those broomstick horses and Something Happened. Maybe it was the memory of my childhood rocking horse. Maybe it was the clamoring of a long-hidden clown within. Maybe it was just the realization that it would make a really good blog entry. Whatever the motivation, the next thing I knew I was trotting a broomstick horse around the Tuileries , wearing a clown-style riding helmet and greasepaint stars on my face.

Just so you know, in the event that you too find yourself in the position of Clown Mountée on a national revolutionary holiday, the Mounted Clowns do not fool around. And the head Mounty is a little bossy. If you are in motion and carrying a broomstick horse, you had better be trotting or at least skipping a little. No walking allowed, given that we're trying to appear horse-like and all. A bugle blow with one finger held in the air indicates a single-file trotting formation. Two fingers in the air means that you trot in pairs. And if the head Clown Mounty decides that the brigade is going to canter in circles around the daisy cannon...well, you just have to do your best not to trip over the mop-tail of your horse or fall out of formation while frantically skipping after the other Clowns MontéEs. I was reprimanded more than once for failing to stay with my partner and for falling behind (but I wasn't really wearing the right shoes for the occasion. I had no way of knowing that I would need trotting-friendly shoes). I started to get the feeling that my brigade was disappointed in me. So I went AWOL. The nice thing about broomstick horses is that you can just hand them to the person next to you.

The Headache Post

2006-07-11T14:18:00.000+02:00

Today I did a very, very hard thing: I sold my stash. All of the yarn that I have accumulated over months of wandering through yarn stores in France, inheriting yarn from friends, finishing projects and having half a skein left over.... I got rid of all of it.

Ok, fine, I'm lying. I got rid of most of it. But the exceptions are justified:
1) the cotton yarn that my sister hand-dyed with carmine,
2) the alpaca blend that I have been saving for something good, and
3) the recycled silk yarn that, although lovely, looks ugly whenever I put it on my body in any knit form. For example: I refuse to give up hope.

The reason for my yarn purging is also the reason for my failure to write anything this week: I am moving. I have another three weeks in Paris, most of which will be swallowed up by packing and shipping and wondering why I really thought I needed four boxes of books that so clearly have nothing to do with my research (why? WHY?!). After that I stop in Ohio for three days, drive to Los Angeles, pause there just long enough to adjust my garters, and then head to San Francisco for the Femme Conference. All while trying to write an article and a book review. I can do that. Right?

a stack of euphoric randomness

2006-07-02T14:39:00.000+02:00

Wow, am I happy today. Seriously, is there some kind of astrological phenomenon that is making me feel this good?

So, a stack of happiness. Because the stack is an underrated organizational method. Although if you want to be technical about it, this is more a list than a stack.

1. Yesterday's strawberries appear to have transformed me. Today I went to the market (there is absolutely nothing better than a market in Paris in July) and now I have cherries, apricots, and peaches in a colander! Maybe the colander is the key to my newly awakened desire for fruit? (Although, for the record, peaches are a fruit that I have always been excited about).
2. I like soccer. Err, I like football, but not the American kind. Last night I watched the match between France and Brazil and caught myself cheering. (Ok, truthfully, Pony and I had a little cheering-and-booing rehearsal during half-time. If we were going to do it, we wanted to do it right.) I think the reason I suddenly like soccer is because everyone here is so excited about it. Every game is followed by a Paris-wide block party. It is the sensation of instant community, at least until people start dumping beer out of their windows. Check out what happens in the metro after a soccer match: They are all singing "Mais ils sont où, mais ils sont où, mais ils sont où les brésiliens..."

3. More adventures with fruit. This is what I look like when I am trying to bend a coconut to my feisty femme will:4. I've noticed that, despite the claims of my subtitle, this blog has yet to reference either knitting or ukulele-playing. How predictable.

5. By the way, for those of you who have not yet begun preparing for the celebration, my birthday is one month from today. Mark your calendars. Me and my favorite fellow Leo (over at un gai savoir) will be having a superb double birthday party. If you have any sense you will get thee to Paris by mid-month, prepared to sing Happy Birthday while boating at the Bois de Vincennes.

June Strawberries

2006-07-01T11:40:00.000+02:00

Those of you who know me well may recall that I am not the most eager eater of fruit and vegetables. Well, to be precise, I may be an eager fruit-and-vegetable-eater, but I am a very challenged fruit-and-veggie-preparer. I just have no idea what to do with them. I wander the farmer's market like a poor lost lamb, staring at the kale and the squash and wondering what all the apparently calm and knowledgeable market-goers are going to do with their lovely market-finds. I will eat fruit and veggies if they are prepared for me by someone who knows how to cook. In fact, I even like them when they show up on my plate. And, really, it's a happy trick of fate that I am drawn to people who know how to cook vegetables and slice away the inedible parts of fruit. Without the help of my various vegetable-devoted loves, I would have scurvy. I mean it.

Often, my reluctant relationship to vegetables is ascribed to having spent my formative years in the midwest. My dissertation director (yes, even she is aware of my vegetable aversion) once remarked that she has known many a midwesterner to look askance at anything but the most conservative of root vegetables. Even though I escaped from the midwest, and heartily protest being called a "midwesterner," I haven't been able to escape it's unfortunate culinary effects.

But today I am eating strawberries from a colander. Of my own volition. Amazing! I think it's because they are Just So Pretty. I mean, look at them:Have you ever seen such sweet, dainty strawberries? It seems that my fruit-and-vegetable-challengedness may actually be the result of a youthful, readerly romanticization of food. Real fruits and vegetables just don't live up to their literary counterparts. Apparently I will only eat strawberries that resemble the ones described in the Little House on the Prairie books.

I wish I could go!!!

2006-06-28T10:18:00.000+02:00

the staring practices of the french

2006-06-28T00:46:00.001+02:00

So. If I have any knowledge of car horn etiquette and usage (and I think I do, given all that time spent in southern California), France beat Italy tonight. Is that true? can Someone Who Pays Attention to the World Cup confirm? [edit: oops, it was Spain, not Italy.]

This post is not about the World Cup. Instead is a belated Paris Pride 2006 post. Actually, it is a post that is all about the way that French folks stare. One significant difference between France and the U.S. is the whole culture around staring. In general, people in France do not look away if you catch them staring at you. They do not look away if you catch them staring at you and then you stare back. In the U.S., I make eye contact with people when I walk down the street. Making eye contact means that (most of the time) they will move out of my way and not harass me. Not so in France; here, making eye contact while walking down the street is read as provocation.

The day of Pride, things were different. It was the day that I finally discovered how to make French people look away when you catch them staring: leave your house mostly naked, looking a little like Cyndi Lauper. It works, I tell you.

Just to give you a sense of my ensemble (because I was distracted enough to forget to take a prom picture before leaving), here is a funny picture of me fanning my liquid eyeliner dry. The important things to note are that a) I am attempting a challenging combination of red and pink and b) this combination of layered underwear is exactly what I wore to the march, with the temporary addition of a black slip hitched up and belted around my hips:
Pony and I decided it would be fun to take pictures of all the people staring as we walked to the metro. There was this guy, and also many of the people behind him at Leon de Bruxelles:
And this guy, who looked somewhat concerned for our general well-being:And these people, on top of the Opera-Bastille. We couldn't figure out if they were staring, or if we had become megalomaniacal narcissists. They're staring, right?Thank goodness I was traveling in the stylish company of Pony and Thomas. I don't think anyone else would have been up to the challenge of so much public gazing.This officially concludes the picture-heavy posts with uninteresting commentary. Next time: the masculinity of solitude....