Reading Log: October - Happy Halloween!

There appears to be a seasonal bent to my reading selections this month, a lot of books that were Halloween-y (from genetic mutations, to the afterlife, to the Japanese beauty industry); belonging and identity were another running theme.

Heavy Words, Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme, by Chris Roberts
Grade: D. This book looked so promising: scores of etymological mysteries solved--with bawdy, morbid, delightfully British explanations! But no, it was drier than a blacksmith's boot.

The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri
Grade: B+. This novel centers around a first-generation Bengali family and the bittersweet coming-of-age story of their son, named after Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. Lahiri really has a gift for describing those complex, compound feelings that characterize growing up between two cultures.

Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body, by Armand Marie Leroi
Grade: A. I love good science writing, and this is it. There's lots of stuff in here that will make your stomach turn (extra renegade skeleton??!?), but Leroi is also quick to point out the beautifully intricate orchestrations that make order and life possible in the first place.

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, by Mary Roach
Grade: B-. This book isn't nearly as joyous an undertaking as Roach's previous book on human cadavers--you get the feeling she was a little bored the entire time she was sniffing out the answers--and while I still love her sense of humor, there was a lot of uncharted territory here that wasn't covered. Still a fun read.

Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics, by Laura Miller
Grade: B. This was the first real academic book I've read since college, and while at times it definitely read like a dissertation (reifications, anyone?), it was such an interesting and refreshing take on gender studies and Japan studies. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and not everyone is trying to emulate the West. Bam!

I haven't forgotten about our trip to Vegas. You'll hear about it soon, I promise. Hopefully, Eli will make a guest blogger appearance. :-P

You know you've been working for two years when...

This like, totally made me laugh this morning.

In other news:
* I am now caught up on Heroes, which conveniently fills the TV-shaped hole in my heart left by Project Runway.
* I spent about 5 hours on Saturday night belting out alternative rock anthems on this amazing invention.
* My car officially got 35.5 miles per gallon on my last tank.
* Some work drama: the cafeteria at work stopped putting fresh pineapple in their fruit salad and the entrance right next to my cube stopped working. As a result, I lose out on my daily delicious Hawaiian treat, I have to walk halfway around the building to get to my desk, and a chain of fools likes to call me on my cell phone to manually let them through the door.

Duck Duck... Lamb?

Eli and I went to dinner at Left Bank last Friday night and came to the realization that more often than not, we order the same kinds of entrees. I always want duck; he always wants lamb.

Then we turned to each other and said, hey wait a minute--I'm kind of like a duck (quack quack), he's kind of like a lamb! Tonight we compared Myers-Briggs types and it sort of fits... we differ in that I'm an extroverted judge-r (ENTJ) and he's an introverted perceiver (INTP). I think we make a good team.

Almost as cool as Men's Pocky

Back when I was in 6th grade, we did a kitchen midden activity for an archaeology unit. Apparently, quite a bit of what we know about the lives of everyday people in ancient times was gleaned by going through fortuitously preserved, stratified piles of trash.

A bunch of teachers in my middle school contributed bags of trash toward the activity, and our assignment was to go through them and make rash conclusions about what life was like for the individual whose garbage was sitting on our desks (did I mention I went to public school?). My team, a cadre of awkward wannabe grungesters, concluded that our subject was totally obsessed with weight issues and secretly hated her cats.

I wonder what an archaeologist 2,000 years from now would say if they saw some of the products we use. Just a cursory glance at our bathroom yields these 21st-century Proctor & Gamble gems, among other things:


Okay, so I think that long buildup was kind of unnecessary and I reeeeally secretly just wanted to post about how Eli's deodorant is called "Showtime" and the idea of him waking up in the morning and putting on "Showtime" before heading off to work, half-asleep, is endlessly amusing to me.

I occasionally use cola.

Oh dear. I drink at least 2 diet colas a day.

"Women who drink cola daily had lower bone mineral density than those who drink it only once a week," she said. "If you are worried about osteoporosis, it is probably a good idea to switch to another beverage or to limit your cola to occasional use." -- from http://health.yahoo.com/news/167458

Overheard in Cupertino

Random wandering guy: Excuse me, you look Asian so maybe you would know...
Sheena: *scrunches eyebrows*
Random wandering guy: Do you know my friend Amy, if she still lives here? She used to live over there (points).

One step at a time...

As of 9PM tonight, I can now say the following in Chinese:

- I cannot drink milk.
- When I drink beer, I turn red.*

YEEEEEESS!

* That's not true, by the way, but can you really claim to speak Chinese if you don't know the terminology around Asian glow?

Reading Log: September

I love to read, but it has been hard to make time for it. Not so, after moving to Cupertino!

My goal is to read 4 or 5 books a month, roughly one a week, so to borrow a page from Young's playbook, I'm going to keep track of the books I read every month to keep myself accountable and record my impressions. I used to keep a reading log in my sassy Jordi Labanda blank book, but it's labor-intensive to write out all the quotes I like by hand.

x The Sea, John Banville (B+; beautiful/pompous)

I was plagued by coincidences; long-forgotten things were suddenly remembered; objects turned up that for years had been lost. My life seemed to be parsing before me, not in a flash as it is said to do for those about to drown, but in a sort of leisurely convulsion, emptying itself of its secrets and its quotidian mysteries in preparation for the moment when I must step into the black boat on the shadowed river with the coin of passage cold in my already coldening hand.

x Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, Julie Powell (B; a fun read, if a bit self-indulgent)

The reason people despise liver is that to eat it you must submit to it... you've got to give yourself over to everything that's a little repulsive, a little scary, a little just too much about it... you can never get away from the feral fleshiness of it.

x The History of Love, Nicole Krauss (A; I wholeheartedly agree with the Washington Post's review--it's "at least as heartbreaking as it is hilarious")

Sometimes I thought about nothing and sometimes I thought about my life. At least I made a living. What kind of living? A living. I lived. It wasn't easy. And yet. I found out how little is unbearable.

x The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon (B; charming, sort of pointless)

All the other children at my school are stupid... I'm meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult and also everyone has special needs, like Father, who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in is coffee to stop him from getting fat, or Mrs. Peters, who wears a beige-colored hearing aid... none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs.

Now if I could only muster up the courage to keep myself just as publicly accountable for my fitness goals... ;-)

Alone in the sprawl

With Sheena out of town for the weekend, the logical thing for me to do was go out and talk to the locals, and in Cupertino this means a middle-aged Chinese lady. But it's not as strange as it sounds. This Chinese lady is Sheena's--and now my own--Chinese tutor.

So when Sheena and Keyvan were giggling (or maybe just smiling dispassionately) over past MTV crushes, I was being presented with a Soviet-planning-style overview of payment, teaching supply, and scheduling logistics. It didn't take long for me to realize that my Chinese is pretty rusty, but I was able to walk away with some salient learnings from the session:

1) The Chinese flag is red not because red stands for communism, but because it represents the blood of all the people who died supporting Mao during the civil war. Think about this the next time you're in Shanghai walking down East Nanjing Road (photo 16).

2) Qinghua is the best university in China, partly because it's one of the best science and technology universities in China, but mostly because my tutor's husband got his PhD there.

3) The Chinese government has a propaganda department because without such a department, the rural masses would have no idea what to think about major national and international issues. In other words, it's not an effort to get everyone behind their points of view, so much as an educational initiative. However, the most interesting part of this argument was her claim that, without the propaganda people writing articles about how China should approach Japan, Chinese people would have run Japanese people and businesses out of the country during the protests of 2005 (and others). Also, I think she might have suggested that Tiananmen was probably the right thing to do at the time, but that's another topic for another lesson.

Until then, onward and upward.

Improper Bostonian

I haven't posted in ages, but I have a great excuse--I was in Cambridge!

Last Thursday was sort of a homecoming for me, and even after two years of being away, I found my old stomping grounds to be pretty much the same, save for the notable absence of Wordsworth Books. I've sworn that I'll never live in the Boston area again, but it's funny what a magical place Cambridge can be when the weather is perfect and your closest encounter with slush is a memory indexed three years back--oh, and when you're with amazing friends, friends that will do crazy things like this:

Sheena: Hey, is that Gideon Yago from MTV? I had the biggest crush on him freshman year of college.
Hester: GIDEON!
Gideon turns around and waves. Chorus giggles.