shrink, I want to kill

I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill.














Bono meets Pentagon chief to discuss poverty

sabado gigante

Since I got here I've kind of been avoiding hanging out with my boss and his wife, not always on purpose, but usually because our schedules don't quite sync up. Anyhow it was starting to make me feel a little guilty, so on Saturday morning I joined them for a trip to the waterfront area on the Embarcadero. We went to a cool arts and crafts fair at the end of Market Street and then an awesome farmer's market at the ferry building.

Being Saturday, the whole place was packed with tourists. It was insane, especially when we got down towards Pier 39, a place I hope I never get to visit again. There were some cool sea lions:

but other than that, it was nothing but fanny packs and visors and sandals with socks in every direction. I felt kind of bad because my boss' wife wanted to shop for souvenirs for the grandkids, but my boss seemed to think I was bored and kept trying to keep her moving. I wasn't so much bored as claustrophobic, but when they mentioned they were heading to In and Out Burger, I had to bail. I've been eating out for every meal since Tuesday, and it's hard enough to be healthy just based on eating out, never mind eating out at places like In and Out Burger. Plus if I saw one more fanny pack I was going to puke.

There were so many people out that the streetcars and MUNI cars were full and kept going right past every stop, so I decided to walk back. Even though it was only like 2pm, I already felt stressed out from all the tourism, so I stopped for a drink at a place on a little side street. I'm obsessed with bars and restaurants that have outside seating, and although the weather seems to be constantly gorgeous here, not many places have patios. I guess Californians are so used to the awesome wetaher that they're over sitting outside. But I'm not. So I ordered a gin and tonic, which I later found out cost $9.50, and had the extreme pleasure of eating these guys:

Healthy, delicious, and only $3 more than the drink. I walked towards the hotel and got accosted by a Greenpeace volunteer who wanted to talk to me about, of all things, Cape Wind. Well this poor guy, who approached me asking "Hey! Do you care about the environment?" sure picked the wrong passerby. I gave him a talking-to... told him about the time I met Jim Gordon... assured him that I, too, love renewable energy... signed his letter to Nancy Pelosi... and went on my merry way, feeling like such an educator.

After I got back to the hotel I collapsed on my bed for a few minutes, briefly stopped by the wine social, then met up with Hannah's sister Marisa in the Mission. We went to a tapas place on 16th Street, ordered a pitcher of sangria, and did some serious catching up. It occurred to me that I haven't seen Marisa since 2002, which is a seriously long time. Even though we had five years of personal life updates, we ended up talking about Michael Pollan and structural adjustments and other semi-dorky things i love to talk about. It was really refreshing to meet up with someone I haven't seen or spoken to once in five years, and feel like we hadn't skipped a beat.

The restaurant was ridiculously loud, so as soon as we paid the bill we got right out of there and headed to a bar called Delirium, where the people were dressed in black and the PBR flowed like water. Marisa ordered us pints of a delicious local amber beer called Boont's and we resumed our catching up. By the time we got to about 2004, it was already past my bedtime, which has gotten a lot earlier since I've arrived. The time change was actually really beneficial to my waking up early, but that night was probably the first time since I got here that I've been out past midnight.

dia cuarta: viernes

at this point I can barely remember what i did a few minutes ago, let alone what I did on Friday. but for the sake of all of you for whom a day without my blog is like a day without the Lord, I'm going to try.

I got to sleep a little later than usual, and we went to a meeting near the Embarcadero to check out the location of our second two trainings. the lady was a half an hour late, so we pretty much saw it without her help. But then she got there and we all went out to lunch at the ferry building.

The ferry building is kind of like Quincy Market, lots of food and food-related retail. Its customers seemed to be half tourists and half people who work in the neighborhood. We got some fresh bread from the Acme Bakery (lame name, good bread) and some interesting cheese from the Cowgirl Creamery (ditto). And I got gelato.

After the meeting I decided to walk back to the hotel, which turned into an epic excursion. I stopped at a few places trying to find tarnished silver, as is my custom, and got some [relatively] cheap pants at Anthropologie. Thank GOD there aren't any of those around Lowell, or else I'd be insanely broke.

I figured since I was already on a three-hour-minimum walk, I'd veer off and take an even less direct route and ended up back in the Mission. I wandered into a bookstore where I found this little gem:














if you can't see it clearly, it's Kermit the Frog saying "modernity has not come to terms with its own technics." true, I thought, and bought a postcard of some Mexican luchadores.


I made it back to the hotel just in time for the wine social. I was pretty thirsty after my four hours of walking, and ended up polishing off an entire bottle of white wine with another guest. He was kind of a strange bird, a dude from Baltimore who was here to visit his boyfriend. At first I was talking to a couple from England who were here celebrating their anniversary, and he was kind of off to the side, chiming in occasionally but looking a little like he was off in space. After the English guys left we bonded over missing our boyfriends (his lives in SF, but it seemed like something weird was going on between them) but things got a little awkward (for me anyways) when he started talking about personal stuff like his boyfriend's blanket-stealing habits.

All of a sudden I realized it was already dark out and I'd been drinking wine since 6pm on an empty stomach. My boss called to see if I wanted to go to dinner with them but I felt a little bit beyond the point where I felt like trying to make intelligent conversation in a family setting. So I took a long walk and ended up stopping at a dark, dank diner, where much to my own surprise, I ordered a beer. They had Newcastle, which I haven't seen much here, on tap, and I just couldn't resist.

april wasn't all that cruel this year

There are probably two or three people in the universe who I haven't [drunkenly] told about my plans to throw a Super Festive Post-Graduation Drunken Softball Extravaganza. If you're one of those people, I should let you know that I live right across the street from the best little league field in all of Lowell. I don't know what makes it 'the best,' probably just that I can see it from my porch, but whatever, it's the best. Anyhow, I was at school all day pretending to work but not really doing anything, so I decided to come home and pretend to work on the porch. That didn't really work out very well because there was an awesome game going on and also, somehow I get wireless internet out here. I've been totally unproductive, surprise, surprise.

But blogging is kind of like work, at least in the sense that it's something I haven't done in forever. I have an excuse though - I was really sick! OK, I was only sick for like 12 hours, but it was horrible timing. I literally haven't gotten sick since the first summer after I graduated from college, so I don't handle it very well. I missed an entire day of this conference that I was supposed to present a paper at, a paper that I've been working on for months with my boss/professor. So that sucked. But I made a full recovery and went to the conference all day on Friday.

Since I am mentally unable to sit in one place and listen for more than 15 minutes, I volunteered to photograph, which gave me justification to do what I do best - wandering around aimlessly for 7 hours talking to people and occasionally taking some pictures. As far as academic conferences go, it was actually a really cool one; people came from all around the world to present about community-university partnerships (in the past I've referred to them as 'stupid f-ing community-university partnerships, but once we finished our paper they seemed a lot less aggravating).

On Friday night we went to see Robert Randolph and the Family Band at the Avalon. Their music itself was along the lines of Medeski Martin and Wood, but they reminded me more of the North Mississippi All-Stars, a very Southern sound, long jams but with a lot of bass and a lot of energy. It was by far one of the best live shows I've seen in a while - possibly the best since the legendary New Deal extravaganza at the more-infamous-than-legendary Palladium. Palladium horror story #374: I briefly dated a guy who left a bouquet of dead sunflowers on the hood of my car. I should have known better - he had a Palladium "Gold Card."

Speaking of the North Mississippi All-Stars, the Beachcomber opens in just a few weeks! The first few Friday nights they have a special deal where the $10 cover gets you a free season pass. For anyone who hasn't been there, it's uh-mazing. It's a Cape Cod institution: a big shack-like thing with sand and sawdust all over the floor, overlooking the most gorgeous beach on the Cape, with incredible live music almost every night and a ridiculous raw bar. Opening night is May 24th - who's coming with me?

My yearning for home-cooked food struck again yesterday, and I spent pretty much the entire day cooking Syrian food. My ancestors did not mess around: the food is almost impossibly labor-intensive and time-consuming to make, and there are almost no shortcuts. There are definitely times when, although you end up with an equally "home-cooked" meal, you will have used the microwave, a store-bought sauce, or even spices from a jar. I'll admit I didn't make my own yogurt or grind my own lamb, but other than that I was faithful to the way I saw this stuff made when I was growing up.

I got home from the store around 2pm and started making tabbouli - by the time 6pm rolled around I hadn't even finished drying the parsley yet. This is as much a function of my procrastinating and puttering around as anything else, but still... I brought some of the food to a potluck at school today and a friend asked for the recipe, so here it is. Keep in mind this is one of my Not Recipes, and if you enjoy the tabbouli you get at the supermarket, or Lebanese tabbouli for that matter, you might be surprised at how this comes out. So feel free to omit ingredients you don't like, add other stuff, or change the amounts according to your tastes:

Rinse a cup of medium bulghur wheat and get most of the water out, then put it in a big bowl. Add 5 or 6 big tablespoons of olive oil, the juice of two lemons, about a teaspoon of salt, and a tablespoon of Syrian pepper (which I will explain below). Mix it up and let it sit and marinate while you deal with the vegetables.

Wash and drain 2 bunches of flat (sometimes called Italian) parsley. Spread out a bath towel and put the leaves on it as you pick them off the stems; let it dry out for a while then pick up the ends of the towel and shake it around to get more of the water off (you don't want to bruise and wilt the parsley by patting it dry - if you do pat it dry to save time, be gentle.)

Put about half the parsley in the big bowl on top of the wheat. Then add in the other vegetables, which are all chopped: three seeded tomatoes (or use beefsteak tomatoes and don't worry about seeding them), half a large peeled cucumber or a whole small one, a bunch of scallions, and bunch of fresh mint. Add the rest of the parsley, mix it all up, cover it tightly, and put it in the fridge for at least an hour. Then taste it and adjust the seasonings, adding more lemon juice, oil, salt, Syrian pepper, or whatever else you want. It gets better the longer it sits in the fridge.

Syrian pepper, or da'a, is what makes Syrian food taste like Syrian food, so don't skimp on it, and whatever you do, do NOT try to use plain black pepper instead! Over the years I've realized that everyone makes this a little differently, even within a single family, which is kind of weird. I prefer this formulation; it's a little heavier on the cinnamon than most, and easier to remember because it goes 3-3-2-2-1-1:

3 parts allspice
3 parts cinnamon
2 parts black pepper
2 parts white pepper
1 part nutmeg
1 part ground cloves

ode to roo roo, transcription goddess

roo roo is, among many other awesome things, a transcribing machine. This girl is a trooper, a saint, and a research assistant all in one. Jack Dougherty was a fool to let her go - if I were him I would have messed with her transcript so she couldn't graduate, that way she'd be stuck at Trinity for a few more years of dedicated service.

Not many people can say they have a friend who'd be willing to give up a perfectly good Friday and Saturday afternoon to do them a favor - especially when the favor involves being glued to a computer transcribing a seemingly endless series of "ums," "likes," and "you knows" interspersed with the occasional money quote about green cleaning. Her transcribing enabled me to feel like I was "working on my thesis," while in reality I was messing around with my vacuum cleaner, blowing up a balance ball, chatting on the phone with my mom, and generally puttering around the house.

Yeah, and then at the end of it all, I sent Amanda home with a transcribing machine and another tape, just in case she feels the urge to spend any more of her free time facilitating my thesis. How can I resist? Her spelling and grammar are impeccable, she knows how to type with all her fingers. Really, it would be futile for me to transcribe the interviews myself when she's clearly so much better at it. This is what Kant was talking about, right?

i heart

that is all.

and another thing...

I know, two posts in one day after a veritable lifetime of nothingness... Anyhow, I just wanted to let everyone know that my flickr is back in full effect (I had made it private due to some stalker-ish ex issues). If you like pictures of

cute babies









food









and me being a weirdo









then this is the place to go.

urbane renewal

I have a lot of catching up to do. To all three of you people who actually read my narcissistic ramblings, I hope you haven't been crying yourself to sleep every night, asking The Lord why He has not answered your prayers for more blogging from me. I also hope that my lack of blogging hasn't caused anyone to get more work done while at work. As you know, people died so that we could slack off and read blogs at work.

Now then, where to begin? Let's go back, way back in the day to Christmas. It was good. I decided that "finishing my final papers" was a pipe dream, asked my kindly professor for an extension, packed up my most festive belongings, and went to Worcester. Only one of my Woo peeps was around so I was forced to spend a lot of quality time with my family. They have recently given up hoping that I'll get married and resigned themselves to Single Anne in some very interesting ways. Case in point:

Yes, that's me with the awesome set of Tupperware my parents got me for Christmas. Their line of reasoning, as my mother so tactfully explained, is that normal people get Tupperware (et al) as wedding gifts because they are "setting up house." Since I won't be getting married anytime soon, it logically follows that I won't be getting any wedding gifts. I do, however, need Tupperware just as much as a married person might. Despite many key differences, I have a few things in common with married people, namely that I Cook Food, Eat Food, and Put Food In The Refrigerator. Other notable presents included a nice set of Pyrex, a cookbook, and a double boiler. My brother got games and money and other fun stuff, but I'm not bitter.

So while at my parents' house, one of my traditional favorite activities is to go through the drawers and closet in my old room, scrounging for stuff that may be useful to me now that I'm a starving Rad Student. I found some good books that I never read when they were assigned, some shoes I'll probably never wear, some age-old chocolate that I totally ate anyways, and... my old diary in the drawer of my nightstand...

Now, finding an old diary could be considered a happy occasion - it's fun to look back and remember all the crazy shit you did when you were younger. Reading my old diary, however, my nostalgic giddiness was soon replaced by a feeling of extreme panic. This diary, chronicling my last year of high school and first year of college, had been laying around in a drawer in my room for seven years. About two years ago, my mother began sleeping in my room occasionally because my father snores loudly. About five years ago, my parents began moving random crap (the Nordic-Track, appliances, etc.) into my room. Most importantly, about twenty-five years ago my parents began going through my stuff at will. I'd be very naive to assume they never happened upon this old diary, and I'd be even more naive to assume that if they found it they'd say "Oh, look, it's Anne's old diary. We'd love to see what's inside... But no, we have the utmost respect for my daughter's privacy, as well as the utmost faith that there's nothing in there that she wouldn't have already told us! We're walking away now, bye-bye Anne's diary!"

It's pretty likely that given a whole seven years they've read that thing at least once or twice, and I am officially mortified. My only hope is that they got distracted by a phone call or fire alarm right before they reached the deflowering episode. Needless to say I put that thing right into my overnight bag and brought it back to Lowell, where it can't do any more harm than it's already done.

Well, I'm not doing a very good job of catching up here, but I have a Grad Student Association meeting to go to. I love being part of an organization whose members are so f-ing cool that they meet on Fridays from 5-7pm. Peace!

my new haircut

story to follow as soon as I have time to write it... this is such a lame post considering that I've written nothing since before Christmas, but I just have to get this out in public, so that I may ask the public: is this a mullet?

christmas, yay.

every christmas eve eve I hear this weird ominous music in my head.














it's coming...

public school

I spend a good amount of time trying to convince people that UMass Lowell is a great school, that it doesn't deserve its horrible reputation, and that I'm getting a super rigorous education (well, as rigorous as I can handle anyways).

Then UML decides to put THIS on their homepage to advertise how eeeeeeasy it is to get a few credits over winter break.

I have no words to describe how misguided this marketing scheme is, how many months of convincing this is going to set me back, how much lamer I now feel for being overwhelmed by my coursework...

tha woo

I went to Worcester with my boss/professor Bob yesterday. We did some interviews and one guy drove us around the neighborhood where I went to school when I was little. I didn't tell him that until we had already left the neighborhood, because I thought telling him would be like cheating.

It was so surreal though, to hear this guy talk about these places as if we were tourists (well, weird eccentric tourists who come to see abandoned factories and redeveloped affordable housing units). It was interesting to notice what he mentioned and pointed out and what he glossed over. Like I said, though, I kept my mouth shut.


I was sad that we didn't have more time after the interviews, I should have shown Bob some more Worcester, like this mural that I saw every day of my life for years:

It must have been done right after the Berlin Wall fell. The Perestroika and Glasnost were always there; the Target logo was not.

I just finished this a few days ago. I started it over a year ago as a Solstice present for Maggie, then it evolved into a birthday present for my mother. Her birthday was September 12, and she got it on Thanksgiving. Not bad, but I'm getting faster and more efficient every day. When I called my dad on his birthday (November 29th) I told him that his birthday present will definitely be finished before it's too warm to wear a scarf.

croix is absurdly cute

OK, compare and contrast: no wonder she's the freaking godmother and I'm the...not... Maybe my mother is on to something with all her worrying.

i heart illustrated nihilism

Swallow your poison, for you need it badly.