I Know Who I Am

Today was one of those days when everything just fits. I woke up late enough to recover from last night, left the building with ten minutes to get all the way to the Benson, and made it. Arabic class did not confuse me for once, I was alert and answered several questions about conjugation in fusHa. I dominated the speaking appointment afterwards even though my partner is in 301. My vegetable stew is even better reheated, though the greenhouse tomatoes look like they have never been cooked, much less simmered for hours, and this is disturbing.
Blue bled through the clouds.
Back in my room, I managed to create a semi-coherent essay about my writing process in an hour and a half and, in class, got the exact person I wanted to conference with. His essay is much better, with an extended metaphor throughout comparing his writing process to the process of evolution. I discovered someone from Lit is also in English Linguistics; I finished my Visiting Teaching; I found out that I really did not have to supervise this month. Tonight I finally called my mother and I recorded a good copy of "Mad World". Today was one of those days when all my thoughts come together. Whence or when or where or what I am or was or ever will be does not matter because I know who I am. I am the lone figure on the flat blue sand when the moon is larger than the night. I am white cotton and black silk. I am sharp cinnamon and sweet garlic and bitter cacao. I am a wordsmith. I am a belovèd daughter of God and I am a sister to all. I am wide brown eyes. I am a critic. I am an enabler. I am a razor tongue so quick that the pain comes days after the blood has stopped. I am a dreamer. I am a realist. I am Beth.

Pathway Unknown; I Like It That Way

Today I learnt the draft that I handed over to a fellow struggling writer, we both failed NaNoWriMo last November, was not only enjoyed, but shared with a roommate. I don't know what to do; I don't know what to do! The dream of seeing my name on the front of a novel in the corner bookstore was never for a book like this, YA fiction. I want to write The Great American Novel like Steinbeck or Faulkner or Hurston.
On the other hand, though I check BooksWeek every Sunday when I'm home (actually, we buy the Sunday paper during our Saturday runs into town) and check out the Absurdist and/or literary works featured there, I have to admit that YA romantic fiction is the brain-rotting candy of my off-days when I'm in sweats and the stupor of withdrawal. It's why I never left the house over the semester break. And, in my book's defense, my mother told me it was a peculiarly well-written predictable novel, so I guess that counts for something.
My other attempts have been post-apocalyptic fantasy, modern (but not hard-boiled) detective fiction, and a YA thriller involving pyro-telekinesis. So basically, I have no class as a writer. Maybe I shall separate my real personality from my mass-market fiction one and go by Noël Ines. Maybe I should publish Plead in serial form, like in another blog.
I have no idea where my life is going – the Foreign Service, the bestseller's list, a district attorney's office, an eternity in academia, a cardboard box in Capitola, the possibilities are too endless to worry about. I thank God in heaven that I have possibilities. I thank my parents for not believing that they have all the answers (or the money) for me, unlike a good friend I talked to yesterday. If I screw up my life, at least I will be secure in knowing that I chose to screw it up.
And if you ever see a trashy book with Noël Ines on the cover, that's me.

Sunny day, chasin' the clouds away…

Today, as I do most days, I clicked on one of the random Hotmail links to MSN stories and came up with one for guys dating a woman with Seasonal Affective Disorder. While I do understand that I have a tendency to develop any disease I hear about, I seriously think I might have this. I mean, I felt deep depression most of the year when I was staying in the Portland area, especially during the nine months of uninterrupted drizzle. But during the few sunny days in July, I felt like all that sadness was a dream. In fact, during the summer I might even consider myself a Morningperson since I wake up with the sun around 5:00 a.m. and naturally fall asleep around 10:30 p.m. Right now I feel like sleeping forever, possibly because I didn't take anything this morning but also because it is dark and dark makes me want to sleep.
The Disney-obsessed One and I have a silent war about those blinds, because I want even a few hours of overcast light to come in, and I am pretty sure she steps on the pile of dirty clothing I have accumulated below the blind-adjuster thing in order to close them. The window's on my side of the room! How can she stand sitting in the dark in this basement for days on end without going absolutely nuts?!
I can't wait for summer, to have sunlight on my skin (which looks sallow without enough melanin) and sweat on my face and sandals on my feet. And I will wear cotton dresses every day.

Dresses are the new jeans.

Do you know what it's like to have changed so much that your old friends don't recognize you? I ran into another one today; just back from his mission, he was going on in Spanish as all foreign-language RMs do. Maybe he didn't see me, but even if he did I doubt he would recognize me. No one else from my MH possie did, except Shelley, and I had seen them more recently. It's surreal to look out over a group of people, knowing so many intimate things about them, and they have no idea. They wouldn't know me from Eve.
I wish my name were Eve.

The More I See of You the Less I Want To

Honestly, I'm not really sure why I'm like this. Maybe my heart is really a Sub-Zero. Maybe it's just that when I don't see much of someone, I can fill all the gaps in knowlege and memory with ideals. For some reason my roommates have not been too affected though, maybe because they are in a Kantian category for family, a necessary evil, rather than the category for friends, best enjoyed in small doses. But I don't like spending too much uninterrupted time with family, either, so maybe I have a separate roommate category that allows me to tolerate the idiosyncrasies.
Last night Kramer said that if a guy realized one of his roommates were weird, he would just ignore him. I guess the difference in our situation is that we are all incredibly weird, so avoidance, citing moral superiority, is not really an option. We all have such varied types of weirdness: The Disney-obsessed One, The Artiste One, The Belching One, The Screaming One, The Melancholy One, and myself, The Hyper-verbal One.
To prove my weirdness, I will mention that the fascinating book I am currently reading is The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. It is full of so many ideas and so many books I need to read; I especially enjoyed the discussion on bathos. The Disney-obsessed One found it amusing that I'm reading a glossary for fun, but yesterday afternoon she had a Christina-Aguilera-type version of "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Da" on repeat, so I'm not sure she can make any value judgements.

My first-born is likely to be a freakishly-short, autistic macrocorm with a large head, male-pattern baldness, and a lifetime BMI around 26.

So take him; I won't want him.
Anyway, I already got into one of these guessing games over the break. It cost me $4.95 in text messaging charges and then it turned out that the guy thought I was the woman who had my number before. The tip off was when he listed his interests as "hiking, biking, running, working out, pretty much anything physical". No one I know is that one-dimensional.

And I bet you thought you were really funny to make me look up your comment in the dictionary!

Be a man and don't post anonymously. Unless you are a woman, in which case don't be a man (somehow I don't think surgery works as well the other way), but still don't post anonymously.
—A warning to you, I used to be fat. I could sit on you and it would hurt.

Glorious Food of the Week

Stuffed grape leaves, steaming dark-green packets of West-Asian goodness the size of a child's palm. I first encountered them at the home of the Assyrian neighbors when I was about ten. The Assyrians were always exotic to me, even if they did have the only other children on that forsaken city street. Who would suspect, Iraqi Christians? Though I guess it would it explain why they left. I remember when we brought the father a paper bag of figs from our trees, and he ate it whole instead of pulling the black velvet skin apart and scraping out the pink fructose goo with his teeth. Anyway, that family had grape vines, and when I came over to play video games and basketball with their son, I was always served whatever the rest of the uncles, aunts, grandparents, and cousins who happened to be visiting were having. When we moved into the exurbic farming community filled with, by the way, more racial tension caused by less racial diversity, we planted our own grape vines. And I made my own stuffed grape leaves.
Picture this: rice, meat, onion, mint, tomatoes, allspice, non-iodized salt, full-bodied olive oil without a hint of bitterness, and the lemony flavor of tender grape leaves picked right off the vine. Heaven via saucepan.

Once a junkie…

Mark once told me, whilst I was bemoaning the fate of olive oil in popular opinion since the event of store-bought "pure" blends, that he saw me in another life as an evening alcoholic, downing glasses of fancy wine alone in the dark. I cannot remember exactly how I answered him—something awkward and meaningless—because I was shocked that he had come so close to the truth. How could I tell him that while I am sure that if I did imbibe it would only be blood-red estate-bottled stuff, probably Californian, but depressants aren't really my thing. I go for uppers.

انا لا ذكية

لم أذهب إلى صف العربي وصف الدين اليوم۔ الساعة أيقظني الساعة الثامنة لكن خرجت من شقّة الساعة الحادية عشرة الإّ ربع لأذهب إلى صف الأدب الانجليزي بسبب لامتحان۔ أمس في مساء شهدت برنامج مصري عن الحبّ والزواج. الناس هناك اتكلموا عن أي أحسن، الحبّ قبل الزواج أو الحبّ بعد الزواج. هذا متلف عن هنا؛ ليس في الولات المتحدة أسئلة عن هذا، نظنّ أن الحبّ لازم يكون موجود دائماً. الآن أفكّر في هذه الفكرة كثيراً. هل الحبّ العاطفيّة مهمّ جداً؟ هو كيماويّ فقط، صحّ؟

Morningpeople. Are. Sadists.

Lest you argue, remember that I am apt to throw 12-pound cats and other inanimate objects when an attempt is made to interrupt my vivid dream-life. At three o'clock in the morning I am running on a seemingly unending supply of insomniatic energy. One would think that sleep, sometimes called rejuvenating, would only add to that energy……
Alas, I drag myself out of bed at the fifth pealing of the sleep timer and barely make it close-enough-to-be-on-time to my 9:00 am class. Maybe I am a human solar battery—I charge throughout the day and by nighttime I finally have enough energy to function. That would also explain why I feel more recharged after an afternoon nap with the window open (if my roommate would ever break off her love affair with the pallid fluorescent light and let me open the blinds) than after sleeping eight hours in the dark. (Note to Robin McKinley, you are not the only person who ever had this idea, but I really did enjoy Sunshine.) Like Ellen, my hairdresser/neighbor/evil-cat donor, said, it does not matter how much sleep we get, our functionality only depends on when we wake up.
However, as Ellen also said the last time we were deciding against bangs, the world is ruled by the Morningpeople; it's the worm thing, I guess. My boss is a prime example of the unrighteous dominion given to Morningpeople: last week I stumbled through the dark, snow swirling around me, into a windowless conference room for a quarterly staff meeting that began at seven o'clock in the morning. Did I understand anything that was going on? No. Did the boss look impossibly chipper? Of course. How sure am I that she is a Morningperson? I would deny it if my head or my paycheck were on the chopping block, but not otherwise.

Am I the only one worried about how suspiciously free all of this is?

Like the movies always say, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Who runs these websites and do they do it out of the goodness of their hearts? Does this relate in any way to the Napster/KaZaA debacle of '03? How does anyone muster up any motivation to work on Linux? Who clicks on those Google ads anyway? Should I get Firefox? Is my soul being slowly drained into my computer as payment?

Sticking it to The Man, or, Watch What You Write on facebook

I do realize that this story has already been blogged to death, but I would like to again bring up the famous/infamous/it-depends-on-your-perspective facebook cake party at George Washington University. It seems that several members of the campus police at that university were using facebook to find parties to bust on the weekends; in fact, the campus police had even contacted people with warnings about facebook parties before they even happened.
One group of students had their party shut down for underage drinking after posting the event on facebook last semester. After a lot of planning, they posted information about another huge "Beer Blast". Sure enough, a contingent of police officers arrived a few hours in to find about forty students, including Kyle Stoneman, gathered around cake. That's right, there were cakes and cookies with "BEER" written in frosting, cake in those ubiquitous red plastic cups, a table for cake-pong, cake hidden under beds, and even one enterprising fellow doing a cake-stand. All is explained at cakeparty.org, but so far the site has been so popular that its bandwidth cannot handle it. The New York Times and The Oregonian's bromidic Margie Boulé also have reported the story while discussing the facebook.com phenomenon in general.
The point: WATCH WHAT YOU POST ON FACEBOOK, because the campus faculty certainly are. Rumor has it that even though facebook has only been around for a couple of years, some employers are already checking it to make sure they are not hiring a closet alcoholic/pothead/exhibitionist/Libertarian. Anyone who doubts that a certain other university we all know and love is checking facebook can leave a message about it right here or on my facebook page.

I don't care if you're gay—get your hands off my breasts!

So apparently, being gay now gives a man license to grope, expose, or otherwise humiliate women. Isaac Mizrahi, the designer who now works for target, did just that at the Golden Globes; on assignment to commentate on the awards show for E!, Mizrahi pulled down Teri Hatcher's dress to look for a speech hidden in her bodice, asked Natalie Portman about condoms, asked Eva Longoria about her pubic hair, and squeezed Scarlett Johansson's breasts. The E! Network and Mizrahi excuse his behavior because he is homosexual. (For a more complete report, go to the CNN story).
Am I the only person who sees a problem with this?! Women have been fighting for years to be taken seriously, to be treated with respect. Gay men claim that they want the same type of respect, so why don't they start by giving it? Not sleeping with women does not give Isaac Mizrahi the right to demean women, even women wearing next to nothing at a banal Hollywood event.