One day in third grade, we had a lesson on GOALS, written boldly on the whiteboard in squeaky blue marker. “GOALS,” my teacher warbled, “are very important. You can’t accomplish anything unless you first establish some GOALS.”
I had never heard this, or if I had, I didn’t know that it was so terribly important. I knew that I certainly didn’t have any GOALS. I listened intently, trying to understand this important concept to which I had somehow never been exposed.
My teacher explained further. “You should be able to measure how far you’ve come in accomplishing your GOALS, to check your progress.” I understood this, ok, fine. “Now let’s everybody write down three long-term GOALS. Make sure you have checkpoints. The checkpoints are like mini goals, and every mini goal should lead up to your main GOAL. It’s good to have a checkpoint once a week or once a month, depending on how long your GOAL will take.”
I got out a fresh piece of paper, a sharpened pencil, and stared at my fingernails. My heart began racing and my face flushed in panic, as it always does when confronted with a task I have no idea how to complete. I had no GOALS! My third grade self couldn’t think of any thing I needed to set a goal for, especially not one that would take months to complete. A month in third-grade Catherine time was...well, it was impossible. I concentrated really hard, trying to think of something that I needed to improve about myself, something that would take a long, long time, like a month. Maybe I could make a GOAL to ride my bike faster. Or maybe I could make a GOAL to read more books. I recognized that both these GOALS were very silly and not really measurable, and it seemed like cheating to make a GOAL of something that I would do anyway, regardless of checkpoints.
I don’t remember what I wrote down for my goals, but I do remember that it was basically BS. It is the first time I remember making something up to accomplish a task, just because I knew that if I didn’t write anything down, I would get a bad grade, or, worse, come off as thinking that I was already perfect and didn’t need to set any GOALS. (Even at this age, I was aware that humility is a virtue that will always eventually work in your favor.) I was a good kid, and an impeccable student who got hot, sweaty palms if there was even a chance that I was unprepared for a class, an assignment, a presentation. (Until I got to college and realized that I could procrastinate and still get straight A's...) I was afraid my teacher would see that my GOALS were counterfeit, and then I’d have to admit that I had made them up, or that I didn’t really have any. I would have to think on my feet. I hate thinking on my feet.
But she didn’t see through my fake goals, and I’m sure no one ever thought about my GOALS after that day, but for the next few years I felt anxious dread whenever I thought about my lack of GOALS, because what if I never accomplished anything with my life because of my distinct lack of GOALS? Was I doomed to failure because I simply didn’t know WHAT to do? Did a successful person like the President make more GOALS as a third-grader than I did?
Clearly, I have accomplished some things in my life, whether or not I had clear GOALS: sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. Mostly, I think I trust my gut more than my to-do list and mostly, it works out, because my gut usually self-organizes and creates a mental to-do list which threatens me with that anxious dread if not immediately addressed.
And yesterday when I thought, “I really want to write a decent op-ed and get published somewhere,” my 3rd grade teacher’s thick, quivery voice echoed in my head: “You can’t accomplish anything unless you first establish some GOALS.”
So, internet, here’s my GOAL. It doesn’t have checkpoints yet, and I hope it won’t take months, but I intend to write more, an op-ed, to get into a newspaper or a magazine, something modest, but something I can use as a checkpoint for a grander goal, because seventeen years later my GOALS (always, always capitalized in my mind) are too numerous to mention, and some of the harder ones require some sort of published accomplishment. I want to improve my Arabic, become a *real* tanguera, keep a cleaner apartment and a stricter budget, go to Argentina and gradauate school, pray more, read more nonfiction, get published, write better poetry and more letters (combined, if possible), improve my photography, keep up my French, get a decent 6 pack or at least a 4 pack (don’t laugh), be a better sister, daughter, friend, girlfriend, neighbor...
You can be my checkpoint. Next time you see me, ask me how my GOALS are coming along. And when my op-ed is published, you can be sure it’ll be on this blog and you, my checkpoints, will receive due credit. Checkpoints really do make it so much easier.
Monday, November 05, 2007
Thursday, November 01, 2007
The More Things Change
Over a year since my last trip, I landed again in Amman yesterday night. It's the same. It smells the same, it feels the same, the sunsets are just as rosy pink, the houses are just as limestone white, the taxis still honk as they pass you at 40 mph, just in case you want them to stop. It's election season, and banners fly above the roads advertising candidates and slogans: "We won't settle for anything less than the stars!" My taxi driver shakes his head, "Big nice promises," he sniffs, "But you can only be elected if you have money. All of them, rich men." Sounds familiar.
The Holiday Inn is pleasant, nothing remarkable, but the breakfast, as unremarkable as it was, so so refreshing: tomato, cucumber, and green pepper salad, mana'eesh, shai bi n3n3. Laughing cow cheese. Pita. It never tastes quite as good in America.
But Amman has grown, and seems to be swarming with people, ideas, frustrations, like bees who have outgrown their hive. The traffic is backed up all day: before I could take a cab for a quick Swefieh shopping trip and back to Webdeh; now that ride takes at least 15 minutes longer and costs double. The hotels are always fully booked, the Iraqi accent floats around the city. There are towers under construction, huge, stark metal and glass towers, blatantly defying the city rule that all buildings must be limestone, and under 6 stories. They look like transplants from Doha. There are new pedestrian walkways, to be lined with glamorous shops,under construction: transplants from Beirut. "Everything changes," my taxi driver says, sighing glumly as the traffic comes to another halt, his cigarette dangling out the window.
I told a colleague that in DC, smoking has been banned in restaurants and bars. He looked at me in blank surprise. "This," he said, gesturing with his cigarette, "is the only thing keeping most of us sane."
After I checked in at the hotel I wandered up and down the nearby thoroughfare. I don't know the street's name, if it has one, but it's busy, and lined with a random assortment of shops and restaurants. I didn't feel like playing frogger with the traffic, so I stopped in the restaurant nearest to the hotel, a quick meat sandwich place advertising shawerma and kebab. My Arabic fell off my tongue hesitantly, and the consonants sounded all off to me, like I was speaking through cotton balls. "You speak Arabic?" the meat man asked. "Well...yes, but I studied here a long time ago, and I don't practice a lot." He shrugged, "Soon you will remember." I sat outside and watched the cars zoom pass while the waiter stopped by occasionally and enthusiastically told me Arabic words. (He gestures to the bottled water: "Water: maii. MM-AA-YYYY." I nod pleasantly, "...yes, shukran.")
I remember certain things distinctly: the Burger King sign at the intersection where AMIDEAST was, and perhaps still is, located; the that one block next to my house in Webdeh, with the Jasmine spilling over the edge of the walls; the block between the Zara and the Mango stores in Swefieh, where there is now *gasp* a Starbucks; the street at the North Gate of the university with the Turkish Pizza shop and the smell of that falafel/shawerma stand where we ate every lunchtime with a bustling crowd of students; the hill up to CSS at the University, the smell of those trees, the crunch of that mulch under my feet; the November rain and wind mixed with the clear, dusty, only vaguely polluted smell of Amman's streets, whipping around my umbrella. Memories are rarely one-time events, but those events which are repeated daily, so you hardly know you're creating memories until one day after your habits have changed, you're struck by a smell, a sight, a voice, and you remember...
I don't have any claim to this city, except that I studied here once, and I have visited twice, and that I know some families, and that I speak some language, and that I really like mansaf. But I often feel that the whole of Amman, or Jordan, is greater than the sum of its parts: I don't particularly love the language, the food, the people, the politics, the limestone, the jasmine, by themselves: there are other places with purer language, better food, prettier flowers. But together, they create something so beautiful that I often stop as I'm walking down the street and take a deep breath and look at someone's white porch overlooking a crowded street and a herd of sheep, and all the beauty and nostalgic pain of my memories settles on top of my eyelashes and in the middle of my chest, and for a second, it doesn't matter that my memory is often faulty or that things change so drastically so quickly. I feel that tingle of deep, dizzying recognition, and think that maybe...maybe I'll extend my trip a few days.
The Holiday Inn is pleasant, nothing remarkable, but the breakfast, as unremarkable as it was, so so refreshing: tomato, cucumber, and green pepper salad, mana'eesh, shai bi n3n3. Laughing cow cheese. Pita. It never tastes quite as good in America.
But Amman has grown, and seems to be swarming with people, ideas, frustrations, like bees who have outgrown their hive. The traffic is backed up all day: before I could take a cab for a quick Swefieh shopping trip and back to Webdeh; now that ride takes at least 15 minutes longer and costs double. The hotels are always fully booked, the Iraqi accent floats around the city. There are towers under construction, huge, stark metal and glass towers, blatantly defying the city rule that all buildings must be limestone, and under 6 stories. They look like transplants from Doha. There are new pedestrian walkways, to be lined with glamorous shops,under construction: transplants from Beirut. "Everything changes," my taxi driver says, sighing glumly as the traffic comes to another halt, his cigarette dangling out the window.
I told a colleague that in DC, smoking has been banned in restaurants and bars. He looked at me in blank surprise. "This," he said, gesturing with his cigarette, "is the only thing keeping most of us sane."
After I checked in at the hotel I wandered up and down the nearby thoroughfare. I don't know the street's name, if it has one, but it's busy, and lined with a random assortment of shops and restaurants. I didn't feel like playing frogger with the traffic, so I stopped in the restaurant nearest to the hotel, a quick meat sandwich place advertising shawerma and kebab. My Arabic fell off my tongue hesitantly, and the consonants sounded all off to me, like I was speaking through cotton balls. "You speak Arabic?" the meat man asked. "Well...yes, but I studied here a long time ago, and I don't practice a lot." He shrugged, "Soon you will remember." I sat outside and watched the cars zoom pass while the waiter stopped by occasionally and enthusiastically told me Arabic words. (He gestures to the bottled water: "Water: maii. MM-AA-YYYY." I nod pleasantly, "...yes, shukran.")
I remember certain things distinctly: the Burger King sign at the intersection where AMIDEAST was, and perhaps still is, located; the that one block next to my house in Webdeh, with the Jasmine spilling over the edge of the walls; the block between the Zara and the Mango stores in Swefieh, where there is now *gasp* a Starbucks; the street at the North Gate of the university with the Turkish Pizza shop and the smell of that falafel/shawerma stand where we ate every lunchtime with a bustling crowd of students; the hill up to CSS at the University, the smell of those trees, the crunch of that mulch under my feet; the November rain and wind mixed with the clear, dusty, only vaguely polluted smell of Amman's streets, whipping around my umbrella. Memories are rarely one-time events, but those events which are repeated daily, so you hardly know you're creating memories until one day after your habits have changed, you're struck by a smell, a sight, a voice, and you remember...
I don't have any claim to this city, except that I studied here once, and I have visited twice, and that I know some families, and that I speak some language, and that I really like mansaf. But I often feel that the whole of Amman, or Jordan, is greater than the sum of its parts: I don't particularly love the language, the food, the people, the politics, the limestone, the jasmine, by themselves: there are other places with purer language, better food, prettier flowers. But together, they create something so beautiful that I often stop as I'm walking down the street and take a deep breath and look at someone's white porch overlooking a crowded street and a herd of sheep, and all the beauty and nostalgic pain of my memories settles on top of my eyelashes and in the middle of my chest, and for a second, it doesn't matter that my memory is often faulty or that things change so drastically so quickly. I feel that tingle of deep, dizzying recognition, and think that maybe...maybe I'll extend my trip a few days.
Monday, October 22, 2007
There are so many reasons not to bomb Iran.
Fareed Zakaria's Newsweek article. I know I could just post the link. But it's worth reading, so here it is, saving you an extra click.
At a meeting with reporters last week, President Bush said that "if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." These were not the barbs of some neoconservative crank or sidelined politician looking for publicity. This was the president of the United States, invoking the specter of World War III if Iran gained even the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon.
The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism." For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.
Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?
When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn't have a nuclear button yet and won't for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)
In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can't be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a "residual rationality," he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.
If I had to choose whom to describe as a madman, North Korea's Kim Jong Il or Ahmadinejad, I do not think there is really any contest. A decade ago Kim Jong Il allowed a famine to kill 2 million of his own people, forcing the others to survive by eating grass, while he imported gallons of expensive French wine. He has sold nuclear technology to other rogue states and threatened his neighbors with test-firings of rockets and missiles. Yet the United States will be participating in international relief efforts to Pyongyang worth billions of dollars.
We're on a path to irreversible confrontation with a country we know almost nothing about. The United States government has had no diplomats in Iran for almost 30 years. American officials have barely met with any senior Iranian politicians or officials. We have no contact with the country's vibrant civil society. Iran is a black hole to us—just as Iraq had become in 2003.
The one time we seriously negotiated with Tehran was in the closing days of the war in Afghanistan, in order to create a new political order in the country. Bush's representative to the Bonn conference, James Dobbins, says that "the Iranians were very professional, straightforward, reliable and helpful. They were also critical to our success. They persuaded the Northern Alliance to make the final concessions that we asked for." Dobbins says the Iranians made overtures to have better relations with the United States through him and others in 2001 and later, but got no reply. Even after the Axis of Evil speech, he recalls, they offered to cooperate in Afghanistan. Dobbins took the proposal to a principals meeting in Washington only to have it met with dead silence. The then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he says, "looked down and rustled his papers." No reply was ever sent back to the Iranians. Why bother? They're mad.
Last year, the Princeton scholar, Bernard Lewis, a close adviser to Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal predicting that on Aug. 22, 2006, President Ahmadinejad was going to end the world. The date, he explained, "is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the Prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to 'the farthest mosque,' usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world" (my emphasis). This would all be funny if it weren't so dangerous.
At a meeting with reporters last week, President Bush said that "if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." These were not the barbs of some neoconservative crank or sidelined politician looking for publicity. This was the president of the United States, invoking the specter of World War III if Iran gained even the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon.
The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism." For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.
Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?
When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn't have a nuclear button yet and won't for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)
In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can't be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a "residual rationality," he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.
If I had to choose whom to describe as a madman, North Korea's Kim Jong Il or Ahmadinejad, I do not think there is really any contest. A decade ago Kim Jong Il allowed a famine to kill 2 million of his own people, forcing the others to survive by eating grass, while he imported gallons of expensive French wine. He has sold nuclear technology to other rogue states and threatened his neighbors with test-firings of rockets and missiles. Yet the United States will be participating in international relief efforts to Pyongyang worth billions of dollars.
We're on a path to irreversible confrontation with a country we know almost nothing about. The United States government has had no diplomats in Iran for almost 30 years. American officials have barely met with any senior Iranian politicians or officials. We have no contact with the country's vibrant civil society. Iran is a black hole to us—just as Iraq had become in 2003.
The one time we seriously negotiated with Tehran was in the closing days of the war in Afghanistan, in order to create a new political order in the country. Bush's representative to the Bonn conference, James Dobbins, says that "the Iranians were very professional, straightforward, reliable and helpful. They were also critical to our success. They persuaded the Northern Alliance to make the final concessions that we asked for." Dobbins says the Iranians made overtures to have better relations with the United States through him and others in 2001 and later, but got no reply. Even after the Axis of Evil speech, he recalls, they offered to cooperate in Afghanistan. Dobbins took the proposal to a principals meeting in Washington only to have it met with dead silence. The then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he says, "looked down and rustled his papers." No reply was ever sent back to the Iranians. Why bother? They're mad.
Last year, the Princeton scholar, Bernard Lewis, a close adviser to Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal predicting that on Aug. 22, 2006, President Ahmadinejad was going to end the world. The date, he explained, "is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the Prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to 'the farthest mosque,' usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world" (my emphasis). This would all be funny if it weren't so dangerous.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Meme, pilfered from Meg
These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. Here's how I shape up against them.
The books I've read are in bold, the ones I started but couldn't/didn’t finish are in italics, what I couldn’t stand has a strike through, those I've read more than once have an asterisk*, and those underlined are on my To Be Read list.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The name of the rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary I watched the movie, though.
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre ...I watched this movie, too.
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and PeaceVanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian : a novel
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo* (LOVE LOVE LOVE)
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi boys
The once and future king
The grapes of wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & demons
The inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s travels
Les misérables*
The corrections
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
The prince
The sound and the fury
Angela’s ashes
The god of small things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A short history of nearly everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves*
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud
Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita (thanks, Lisa!)
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Lesson: Nothing, really, except that I clearly have more books to read.
The books I've read are in bold, the ones I started but couldn't/didn’t finish are in italics, what I couldn’t stand has a strike through, those I've read more than once have an asterisk*, and those underlined are on my To Be Read list.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Catch-22
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The name of the rose
Don Quixote
Ulysses
Madame Bovary I watched the movie, though.
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre ...I watched this movie, too.
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and PeaceVanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian : a novel
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo* (LOVE LOVE LOVE)
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi boys
The once and future king
The grapes of wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & demons
The inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s travels
Les misérables*
The corrections
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Dune
The prince
The sound and the fury
Angela’s ashes
The god of small things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A short history of nearly everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves*
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud
Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita (thanks, Lisa!)
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Lesson: Nothing, really, except that I clearly have more books to read.
Miss Range...with a lead pipe...in the kitchen
Freshman year in the USC dorms, Friday the 13th of October. The sink in our kitchenette clogs, someone turns on the disposal, and a cloud of dark black oily liquid gurgles up from the drain, like squid ink. We were a bunch of 18 year old girls who, while quite capable in many respects, were not really experience plumbers, but we did manage to bucket out the black water and dump it in one of the two communal showers (I know, gross.) As we sloshed from the kitchenette to the showers, we realized that it was not only black and oily, but had a putrid, pungent smell not unlike rancid tofu. It was past 5, when the maintenence guys had already gone home for the weekend, and there we were in our dorm, an unknown substance gurgling up in spurts from the drain in a spring of glossy ooze. It gurgled to a slow halt as we kept our eye on it, and we slept in peace that night, from what I recall. The next day, a USC football game, I was alone in the dorm studying at the table in the common area when I heard a splash! and looked up to see a sheet of water spilling over the sink's edge into a lovely muddy puddle on the floor. I lept up, tied a bandana around my hair, and retrieved our bucket. It stopped of its own accord after a few hauls back to the common shower area. The next Monday, a man came and knocked a hole in our bathroom to fix the pipes. I still have no idea what the black ooze was.
---
Yesterday I came into my apartment after Bible Study, dumped my purse on the bed and went to the kitchen for a drink. There was about an inch of water standing in my sink. The faucet has had a steady drip for a while, but it had never clogged before, not like this. I looked underneath. The seams of the pipe were dripping. I sponged out the water in the sink and dumped it down another drain. We tightened and loosened the seams, and the water just kept rushing out--the sink water level never changed. The Manly Man and the handyman came determined that this was not a problem with my drain, but with the pipe system in general: my first floor apartment was the lucky recipient of waste water that couldn't drain properly because of a clog somewhere else in the system. Turns out that the apartment next to mine experienced the same problem. In other words, the water that was threatening to flood my kitchen was not my water. It was OTHER PEOPLE'S WASTE WATER just looking for a way out. Beautiful.
---
One day soon after I returned from Egypt last October, I was standing at the sink doing my dishes and minding my own business when I looked down to see that I had a fat, hairy visitor: one of Dupont's resident rodents had moved in while I was away. (S)he was quite at home on my yellow floor, and looked startled when she realized that she was not the only tenant in this studio. She bolted behind the oven. I bolted to the phone to call my landlord. I then moved to a friend's apartment because NO WAY WAS I SLEEPING IN THE SAME APARTMENT AS A BIG FILTHY RAT, EW, WHAT IF HE CRAWLED INTO MY BED OR SOMETHING, EW EW EW GROSS.
After a few days tempting her with peanut butter on unset rat traps, to lull her into a false sense of security, we set the traps. The next evening, a Friday, I opened the door to see...a bleeding rat. In my kitchen. I closed the door without moving an inch, went to the front desk and left a note saying something to the tune of, "There is a rat who may or may not be dying/dead in my apartment. If the maintenance guy is around, could you please have him look after that?"
The next day, Saturday at 11 AM, I came back to a laughing front desk clerk who thought that I probably was exagerrating and the rat was probably dead, and was I even sure that it was a rat? Mice can get pretty big, you know. We opened the door, and there she was, with her beady bright eyes, nursing her injured paw in my foyer. The desk clerk thought this was hysterical and screeched with a mixture of disgust and delight. We couldn't trap her with a box and broom, and only succeeded in scaring her to seek refuge under my chair (EW EW EW) so that night we set more traps. The next afternoon, I was greeted with a truly dead rat. The landlord took her away so I didn't have to witness the carnage. There had been, he told me, construction in the basement, leaving a small hole(s) through which the rat had probably discovered my cozy, warm, person-less apartment.
I spent the next 24 hours bathing my studio in bleach and vinegar. I think I dry cleaned every item of clothing I owned. My dishes had never been so clean, my wood floors had neevr gleamed with such precision. I cursed the cumbersome 1950s oven that was stuck to the wall, preventing me from cleaning between the wall and the cupboards.
The moral of the story: Never buy a first floor condo. Let someone else deal with the ooze and the pipes and the rats.
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Yesterday I came into my apartment after Bible Study, dumped my purse on the bed and went to the kitchen for a drink. There was about an inch of water standing in my sink. The faucet has had a steady drip for a while, but it had never clogged before, not like this. I looked underneath. The seams of the pipe were dripping. I sponged out the water in the sink and dumped it down another drain. We tightened and loosened the seams, and the water just kept rushing out--the sink water level never changed. The Manly Man and the handyman came determined that this was not a problem with my drain, but with the pipe system in general: my first floor apartment was the lucky recipient of waste water that couldn't drain properly because of a clog somewhere else in the system. Turns out that the apartment next to mine experienced the same problem. In other words, the water that was threatening to flood my kitchen was not my water. It was OTHER PEOPLE'S WASTE WATER just looking for a way out. Beautiful.
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One day soon after I returned from Egypt last October, I was standing at the sink doing my dishes and minding my own business when I looked down to see that I had a fat, hairy visitor: one of Dupont's resident rodents had moved in while I was away. (S)he was quite at home on my yellow floor, and looked startled when she realized that she was not the only tenant in this studio. She bolted behind the oven. I bolted to the phone to call my landlord. I then moved to a friend's apartment because NO WAY WAS I SLEEPING IN THE SAME APARTMENT AS A BIG FILTHY RAT, EW, WHAT IF HE CRAWLED INTO MY BED OR SOMETHING, EW EW EW GROSS.
After a few days tempting her with peanut butter on unset rat traps, to lull her into a false sense of security, we set the traps. The next evening, a Friday, I opened the door to see...a bleeding rat. In my kitchen. I closed the door without moving an inch, went to the front desk and left a note saying something to the tune of, "There is a rat who may or may not be dying/dead in my apartment. If the maintenance guy is around, could you please have him look after that?"
The next day, Saturday at 11 AM, I came back to a laughing front desk clerk who thought that I probably was exagerrating and the rat was probably dead, and was I even sure that it was a rat? Mice can get pretty big, you know. We opened the door, and there she was, with her beady bright eyes, nursing her injured paw in my foyer. The desk clerk thought this was hysterical and screeched with a mixture of disgust and delight. We couldn't trap her with a box and broom, and only succeeded in scaring her to seek refuge under my chair (EW EW EW) so that night we set more traps. The next afternoon, I was greeted with a truly dead rat. The landlord took her away so I didn't have to witness the carnage. There had been, he told me, construction in the basement, leaving a small hole(s) through which the rat had probably discovered my cozy, warm, person-less apartment.
I spent the next 24 hours bathing my studio in bleach and vinegar. I think I dry cleaned every item of clothing I owned. My dishes had never been so clean, my wood floors had neevr gleamed with such precision. I cursed the cumbersome 1950s oven that was stuck to the wall, preventing me from cleaning between the wall and the cupboards.
The moral of the story: Never buy a first floor condo. Let someone else deal with the ooze and the pipes and the rats.
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