saturday, june 17, 2006
Should have been more
Things I wrote from September to June:
- Nine mini-essays on aspects of global food sustainability.
- A long essay on prefaces in 19th century American works about the Middle East.
- The outline of an essay about Sufism, American transcendentalism, and Arab-American literature.
- An introduction to a collection of emails between me and people I’ve never met in person. I angled it as “teen girl talks to older men”, which was true but irrelevant and amusing.
- A personal essay about fruit.
- Three short essays on Latin American modernist writers.
- Four art gallery reviews.
- An essay about an obscure part of Glendale.
- Eight or nine poems.
- A report on hookworms.
- A linguistic analysis of Max’s attitudes toward Valley Girl and Surfer dialects. Disputed, naturally.
- Several “explications” of passages from Paradise Lost.
- Part of a long personal essay about my high school experience.
- A few thousand emails as the voice of del.icio.us support.
Compare to the beginning of the year.
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monday, june 05, 2006
The roof of the nuclear lab
Max and I, taken by his cellphone. My shoulder did get sunburned, but not too badly.
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saturday, april 15, 2006
Two thirds times one quarter
I like my odd combination of spring quarter classes:
- African and African-American Travel Narratives
- Evolutionary Medicine
- Language in Society
- Milton’s Major Poetry
- Unix: History, Philosophy, Influence
Ibn Battuta, hookworms, the superstandard language ideology, MILK MEE, and filesystem abstractions? Yay!
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saturday, january 21, 2006
Reflective meta content
These are the classes I’m taking this quarter:
- Malaise, Melancholy, and the Production of Art
- Latin American Modernism
- Lower-Division Photography
- Empathy and Empowerment Through Reflective Listening
Which means, so far: José Martí, Robert Burton, Joel Sternfeld, romanticism and modernism, body and mind, systematic and empathic, knowable and unknowable, logic and intuition, structure and presentation.
From the Ask A Linguist FAQ:
University should be a more explorative enterprise, where you can frolic in large and fascinating fields of knowledge, where you can shape and refine your thinking about who you are and what your social/political/cultural roles should be, and where you can start to sort out some of the big questions of life.
Where does this lead? Maybe to being a journalist (the current hypothesis), but it certainly is a roundabout method.
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thursday, january 19, 2006
The secrets of Santa Barbara
The Storke Tower reflecting pond (yes, reflecting pond — the filter broke and they let the pool go wild instead of fixing it) is home to the celebrated bent fish of UCSB:
Max (my superlatively awesome boyfriend) showed it to me and took this picture. He asked the biology majors in my house about it and they surmised something about a broken spine repaired by fish surgery. Fish malpractice suit?
He also noticed this:
We’re tempted to scribble “PAL” and/or “SECAM” on the other sides.
