Should I be alarmed that my fingers are turning blue? Should I drink more water?

Tomorrow I file so this is it!  The final push to finish my dissertation, frantically, miserably...

Guns n' Roses makes it a little better.

Softly, softly catch a monkey

I could catch a monkey.

Me: Dude.  Pone.  You're getting a bath as soon as the sun comes out.  You stink.  I can smell you from all the way over here.

Sloane: hm?  What was that?

Me: Bath.  You stink.

Sloane: Yeah, not so much.  I'd rather just lie here with my head on your pillow eating jelly beans while you write you slave over your dissertation revisions.

Me: Seriously.  As soon as the sun is out the balcony for you to dry in you're going in the tub.

Sloane: Do you want the green ones?  I don't like them.  They're too sour.  I've licked them all but I'll just set them in a sticky pile here on your pillow.

Me:  I'm just warning you so you can mentally prepare for your bath...  Come here so I can take your collar off you now.

Sloane:  Whatever.  Hey, are you done with the computer?  I want to update something on my Facebook page.

Those no-good neighborhood kids, racing up and down the street in their helicopters...

This old woman can't get a moment's peace.

There is a dramatic rooftop rescue unfolding outside.  Or the delivery of a water tank to the roof of one of the apartment highrises across the way.  For the most part I like helicopters.  I class them with cranes and sea-planes as mechanical marvels that I will stop and stare at, mouth agape, from time to time.  But this particular helicopter has been hovering at the Barrington-Wilshire intersection for a good forty minutes.  The whup-whup sounds are reflecting off the other big buildings and its becoming a bit annoying.  I can't imagine what is so important that they're paying someone to hang out over a residential area at 9 am on the Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend.  I'm half-inclined to walk over and check it out.  Do you think its just a larger version of that arcade game where you try and operate the giant claw to pick up toys from bin?  Do you think there's an enormous stuffed rabbit lying in the middle of Wilshire, all lavender and eyes begging for you to be the cute little girl to take it home?

And what is the deal with this weather?  Its actually getting darker as the day goes on.  Its May in Los Angeles!  I don't live at the southern tip of Argentina for many reasons, but one of them is the weather.

Yes I am spending the evening in, revising as always.  But I wouldn't have it any other way.  Who cares about Hugo Riemann's psychophysical studies of undertones as a basis for his theory of harmonic dualism?  

I, apparently, do.

oooh!  oooh!  My advisor signed off on my dissertation!  This is huge.  I already had two others, but - as Matt kindly pointed out when I was pleased with myself about getting those - they were the low-hanging fruit.  Mein Doktorvater, however, is the big fish.  And the discerning fish.  He did not get so large by recklessly rushing into open waters, or gobbling up every pudgy worm that may or may not be attached to a hook...  I've lost track of where I was going with this.

Can you tell I'm getting hungry?  Time to go reheat the quinoa for dinner.

I collected my regalia today!

I feel a whole lot closer to the end now.  Sloane and I paraded around the apartment in the full get-up pretending to be wizards.  The velvet feels so soft.  And the lining isn't going to chafe on my naked skin...

The very best part though is the hat.  Here's a picture of me in it (behold!  I am figuring out how to import images!).  I am eating a turnip.

The Gatekeeper

She's also referred to as The Dragonlady and The Troll of YRL.  She is the Dissertation Archivist and she has been known to make grown men cry...

Basically, she's the one who checks the formatting and cotton-content of the bond used (must be at least 25% for preservation purposes, apparently) when you finish your dissertation and turn it in to the library to be kept for posterity.  Since the filing deadline is very strict and she will never budge on margin size, she is often a source of great frustration for graduate students.  Grad students drag themselves in on the day of the deadline, having just given birth to five-years worth of work and then are told that some issue with their pagination means they won't be able to file right then after all.  As if after years of academic posturing we have any ability to follow directions on formatting minutia.  And in The Gatekeeper's defense it must be perenially frustrating to witness this inability to follow simple rules.  So June 2 will be the mighty battle of fatigued, stressed-out, socially inept graduate students and a single, shrill-voiced representative of rigid bureaucracy.  

In an effort to avoid this grand human drama I'm going to try and file the week prior.  And today, I'm going to stop by and visit said Dragonlady with a few samples of my document so that she can check my formatting.  Now, I've had a few interactions with her already though I'd say they were just preliminary encounters.  In the first I called her to ask about copyright permission on figures from texts published by companies that no longer exist.  She replied to contact the publisher and ask them.  Before I could repeat myself that the companies are gone she had already hung up on me.  Helpful.  And THEN, last week, I approached her at the front YRL information desk to ask her when a good time to come by the archive office was (its only open from 12 to 4 so I wanted to come during a lag period in order to be efficient with my time).  She said she won't answer any archivist questions except between 12 and 4 at the office.  I tried to explain that I was just asking when the office was least busy but she cut me off and shooed me away saying to come by between 12 and 4.  Argh, so infuriating!  I stormed outside and almost kicked a pigeon.  So anyway, today is the day.  Official game time, Round One.  I'm going to try and be as polite and ingratiating as possible (I've been instructed to flatter her ego and, if need be, grovel).  I am sympathetic to the fact that she is for the most part simply trying to do her job well.  But, well, she doesn't have to be mean.  

I'll report back.

It came with a Bible decoder ring!

Sort of.

I had a nice conversation with some Jehovah's Witnesses today.  They asked me Sloane's name and if they could pet her and well, how can I not prattle on endlessly about my dog? (bullets, my only weakness...)  Then they asked if I was religious because I looked religious, Catholic in fact.  I said I wasn't Catholic (conversations with total strangers, my only weakness...)  The nice man said "oh, I thought most Hispanic people were Catholic."  Nope, not Hispanic, Old Man.  I explained that I'm mostly ethnically Chinese but also Irish and little Native American.  He thought this was a new in and asked if I thought America belonged to the European settlers or the Native Americans.  I said I don't really think of land belonging to anyone but if I had to choose I'd say the Native Americans were here first.  Continuing to think he was making some headway he then asked why I thought the Native Americans lost their land to the settlers.  I said I thought it was because a bunch of white men ruthlessly killed them all off in order to establish a new kingdom of God.  That's when he just gave me the flyer and let me go.  

In any event, if you want to know whether Adam was composed of two distinct parts, the soul and the body, let me know.  The answer involves both Genesis and I Corinthians.

I don't know how to transition from the above discussion so I'm just going to dive into a list of  unrelated tidbits from the last week (yes, I've been neglecting you, my sweet chickadees, and believe me I have guilt about it.  Not Catholic guilt as we now know, but guilt nonetheless.  Maybe an agnostic guilt of those who flee from intimacy and commitment...):

I got gas for $3.73/gal.!  It was an Arco yes and it was in Whittier but still felt like a small victory.  Especially since there was a long line of cars and I had to be pushy and yell at a very dubious-looking van about edging in before his turn.  I don't care if you're from Pico Rivera.  I will cut you.

Managed to make it to only 1.3 of the 5 events I had planned for Sunday.  Missed out on baby showers and banjo festivals, sadly (cue agnostic guilt).  But I did play lots of beach ultimate.  And our team won!  Now my grey sports bra can retire.

So my little cousin Michael is awesome.  Monday my uncle and cousin descended on me pretty much unannounced which I was at first a little irritated by since Mondays are my very busiest days and I don't really have the means to entertain an 18-year old boy here (tv is broken, no dvd player now that Ting's gone, I thought about trying to make a game for him of vacuuming the apartment and trimming the dog's toenails but that just seems cruel).  But my cousin is super-cool.  I dragged him around with me on campus on Tuesday, took him to my seminar as a show-and-tell for my students.  He even spoke in class!  I haven't spent much time with him since he became, like, a real person so it was actually really nice.  I'm excited that he'll be in LA (he's going to go to UCLA)  for a while so I can see him when I come back to visit.  He and my brother and I can have Hui hapa nights out on the town.

Oh yeah, roomie moved out.  Makes me kind of blue.  Partly because she took all the soup ladles.

More tomorrow.  I'm a sleepy puppy.

Ph.D. in History of Science?

More like Ph.D in Adventure!

Heaven right now would be a swimming pool.

And infinite watermelon.

ferk.

So another ex filed his dissertation today.  That's two now. [1]  I know its not a race.  Though I also know that I'm terribly competitive (I may have inwardly gloated today when I got the last napkin from the dispenser today even though the old lady with the speech impediment was also reaching for it).  It more that I'm just irritated that they're both free and relaxed and loving life while I am right now holed up trying to figure out how to best articulate the way in which the introduction of non-Western music destabilized the notion of a universal aesthetic to the point where the individual experimental subject could no longer stand in for the ideal in psychophysical studies of sound sensation without making concrete causal claims.[2]

I was also just thinking that the word "hoarfrost" needs to be reintroduced into the lexicon, though I suppose it wouldn't come up so easily in a conversation in LA.  Get on it people!

Also, Yoga Action League is on!

[footnote 1] I'd like to point out that despite my stunning good looks, I am not a the strumpet of the UCLA History department.  Both of these wonderful men were in different programs, one all the way up at Cal even.  And, actually, except for the felon, [3] they are the only two people I've dated in the last seven years.

[footnote 2] Fun fact about my advisor: using the words "influence" and "cause" can actually make his head explode.  For the most part I agree with him that as historians we should take care not to impose causality on a situation for which we lack the evidence to do so (the smoking gun for my dissertation would be a diary entry reading: "so I was at Wagner's Das Rheingold today and it got me thinking about my psychophysical experiments in a new and different way.  In fact, it made me stop believing in universal truths.") but I would also contend that taking this care can often lead to, um, verbosity.

[footnote 3] Nested footnotes!  Fun!  Yeah, I'm not telling about the felon.

Joel Watch 2008

Big day today.  Managed to finally track down a committee member that has been AWOL for about 17 months or so.  He had my dissertation open to page 4 when I arrived.  I thought about asking for his opinion on the surprise ending ("she's my sister!  she's my daughter!") but then decided that if I wanted to continue to use his office's superfast copier-scanner-printer thing (I like to call it The Magnum) without good reason (other than that its free and superfast and called The Magnum) that I should be nice.  So I instead told him about the changes the rest of my committee wanted and he said that he agreed with them but was also happy to sign off on the stupid thing.  So I have my first signature!

And, in other PhD-related news, I measured my head today.  

23 inches.  On the regalia-purchasing website this means I require a cap size of S.  On the regalia-renting website I apparently require a cap size of L.  Now, I'm a little self-conscious that my head is weirdly large (I'm also a little self-conscious that people notice me counting stairs to myself but that's unrelated) and well, I know that grad students are very aware of how intelligent they sound when talking about, y'know, la theorie.  So I'm wondering, well, if some sort of vanity-sizing thing is occurring with head circumference.  And, if so, are people desiring smaller or larger heads?  Mine for one, really can't get any bigger or I won't be able to get t-shirts on.  But if it were any smaller, where would I keep all my knowledge and cognitive functions?  In a pocket?  (Latour would be the first to go, and that pesky fight-or-flight response)

I cut my hair today.  I'm quite pleased with my bang situation now.

And speaking of hair (see, its all connecting), I had my students watch part of Pelleas et Melisande (for those of you not in the know, hair is a big part of the incest scene - yeah now you're interested in french opera) today as a reward for their hard work for the first two hours of discussion.  I need to brag about how kickass they were today.  I made them read Schoenberg's wild blatherings on his 12-tone/atonal music AND Bohr's discussion of incommensurability and how the Heisenberg uncertainty principle can be extended from light to life.  And my little lambs did such a good job.  They were fearless.  I'd like to think I was there fearless leader but I honestly had no clue how I was going to connect the readings.

Fearless leader segueway to... what the crap is going on in West Virginia?  

And, the people have spoken, the title remains.

And Eric is a killjoy.

And boy, do my bangs look good.

And le Peu here, snoring and with her stinky dog head on my pillow, would never survive in the wild methinks.  And least not a wilderness without pillows.

Ah, a sunny glade of big fluffy pillows.  I would dream of such things if I ever slept...

blah.

I will sleep when I'm dead.

out of curiosity...

Impact.  

Can neither be a verb nor a gerund correct?

Tony the Paleontologist

My friend Tony is a paleontologist.  He is also a mean-ass scrabble player (plays the little old ladies in tournaments, beats them by exploiting their deepest fears by spelling such things as "incontinence" and "your grandchildren never return your phone calls").  He has a letter from a school kid on his office door in the Life Sciences building that reads something like: "Dear Dr. Friscia thank you for coming to our class and teaching us about fossils and dinosaurs and stegasaurus is my favorite dinosaur and did you know that shit is poop?"  Tony also once offered to take my rock-climber exboyfriend on some trip and then drop him.  Which is, like, I assume against some rock-climber code, joking about dropping.  Anyway it was sweet.  Because Tony is sweet.  Today I was complaining about the bone-crushing agony of my dissertation revisions, as per usual, and he sent me an Uncle Tupelo song on itunes.  Which made my whole day.  So I would like to ask all of you to please, next time you're on south campus, to swing by Life Sciences 5114 and leave a note on his door that reads "Dear Dr. Friscia, _____ is my favorite dinosaur and did you know that shit is poop?"

Because I think that would make his day.

Its official. My dog has a mechanical world view.

She is a believer in causality.  Sarah Jessica Pee Pee here has learned that when she gulps down her entire bowl of water and then goes and sits by the door that I will take her for a walk.  Someone might try and point out here that she has me trained.  To which I defensively reply that I still have agency in this situation.  I don't always take her for a walk when she sits by the door.  Why, not too long ago I kept her in the apartment for three weeks straight.  Sure showed her who was boss...

In other dog-related news, her butt tumor is pretty much gone.  The vet promised as much, though he told me to keep track of its size.  I made a little tumor ruler out of an index card.  Its kept on the refridgerator (how do you spell that?) along with the Hollywood Bowl schedule.

Index cards keep my life from falling to pieces.  I write shopping lists on them.  To do lists.  And when I have to remind myself to move my car before street cleaning I fold one in half and set it next to my alarm clock as a little reminder teepee.

Okay, off to walk Pony.

Another note about Guam

You wouldn't think that there could be anything more to say would you?

Perusing the Guam Pacific Daily News this morning reminded me of a rather romantic narrative (a revisionist history if you will) I apparently created from whole cloth about my mom a long time ago.  Every so often she would refer to her time in Guam when I was very little.  Some how I understood this to be the time that the big evil law firm she worked for right out of law school had sent her there for some case for six months right after her first child was born.  It was just me and my dad, boppin' around.  I helped him with his dolphin research.  He learned how to braid my hair.  I always thought that this unreasonable assignment (sending a mother across the Pacific, away from her young child for six months) was the reason my mom left the firm and started working for the state of California instead.  WELL it turns out that I concocted all of this.  She was only gone for two weeks.  And it was when she had a federal clerkship not when she was doing the firm thing.  Weird.

And that's my Guam story.

It makes me doubt other memories from my youth (first Santa, now this whole thing with my mom's tragic trip to Guam).  Can any of you actually confirm that my little brother exists?  Or that Richie Sambora didn't come over all the time to watch Padres games with us?

Everybody Forgets about Guam

As of 1:45 am local time, Obama is leading with 719 votes to Clinton's 629.  This is with ten districts reporting.  I couldn't figure out how many total districts there are (apparently you need to set up an account with the online Guam Pacific Daily News to get much more than headlines, bah, tyrants) and how exactly the counting of their drop-in caucusing works.  Shoot, I don't even have a ballpark guess on how many people live in Guam.  For all I know its the size of my high school.  In any event, there are 8 delegates that get seated at the convention, each with half a vote and then two superdelegates.  

hm.

I think I just ate a mealy bug.

I was sitting on the balcony eating my cheese and basil sandwich and noticed that the basil plant has a bit of a mealy bug infestation.  I rinsed off the basil before adding it to my sandwich but, oh well, at the very least the mealy bugs are clean now.

And now I'm off to the 18th St. Cafe for some personal time with my dissertation revisions.  It turns out this little gem of a place is not, in fact, owned by Bob Dylan (Sarah, crushing my dreams again).  Which significantly reduces my chances of meeting and then later marrying Jakob Dylan over an Italian Soda.  I think my chances of meeting and then later marrying Prince William over an Italian Soda remain about the same.