Monday, September 28, 2009

One of My Friends Color Coded His Bathroom!










Fried Capers


I had my first experience with fried capers a couple of weeks ago on a pizza, and they were so delicious that I found instructions for how to make them myself here. Frying them makes them bloom (like popcorn, but much smaller). Instead of just being salty little berries, they are tiny, thin, crispy flowers, and I just ate some plain (that's how good they are).

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Now You Know:

My temperature varies between 97 and 99 degrees.


Me to Stearns: "Is the hypochondriac thing annoying?"
Stearns: "No. It's endearing. I would've taken it, if you hadn't taken it first."


Also, I just applied anti-aging cream in anticipation of 26.

Comments on Vows

Vows:

Sweet:

“I just look at his face and it’s like home to me,” she said.

Just plain wrong:

"He and Ms. Coursen exchanged hundreds of text messages, discussing everything from songs on their iPods to how much they liked each other." (I don't think you get to say "discussing" about text messages. "Expressing" maybe; more like "asserting"; but certainly not "discussing.")

Annoying (plus from a text message):

“You get me, so you get me.” (If a man said that to me, I would think he was proud and undesirable.)

Cute!:

"Once 'indoorsy,' she now spends more time outdoors, though she still calls any walk in the woods 'mountain climbing.'" (People should call things the wrong name on purpose more often. It carries more meaning that way.)

Tacky:

"Finally, the couple appeared before the shivering crowd, calmly walking with their parents, the bride in a sleeveless matte jersey dress she bought online for under $200." (Goodness gracious, just tell us you got it at a yard sale already.)

People who like rain are weird:

"True to the contrarian and sometimes cantankerous Woody Creek spirit, he seemed to relish the terrible weather, as if it were preferable to sunshine and other silly luxuries." (For that matter, I don't understand contrarians, either.)

Friday, September 25, 2009

It's a Great Day to Be a Grad Student

"Begin with the principle of subsidiarity, always a good place to begin." --Alasdair MacIntyre

This morning I went to a small group discussion of Simone Weil and a little bit of Neitzche with a professor friend from Villanova.

In the afternoon, I heard Alasdair MacIntyre speak at CUA (he is oddly normal looking--in my imagination, he was very quirky). He spoke about ends and endings, in a lovely tribute to Msgr. Sokolowski that took Sokolowski's work as a starting point (which, I think, any good tribute should do). He took Sokolowski and Aristotle's side over Harry Frankfurt, who sees ends as legitimated by love. On MacIntyre's read, the good as our end is the measure by which we evaluate desires.

And, in my favorite MacIntyre move, he talked about narrative as indispensable in moral philosophy--it is the way in which generalizations are worked out in particulars. And so he talked about Quentin Tarantino films and Kafka stories as examples of 20th century literature, which is devoid of endings.

This made me think of the importance of a good death, which now seems to be ignored entirely or replaced with the idea that a good death is one in which you die fighting tooth and nail against death (I'm thinking here of the blond in Grey's Anatomy).

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Stearns has been missing me since I'm gone so much. Consequently, she's been looking up kittens on Craig's List. I remembered today that she is allergic to cats.

Stearns: Fairly typical classroom conversations

Me, to 9th grade girl: "I like your makeup--you wear blush very nicely."

9th grade girl: "Oh, Miss Stearns, I just love your eyelashes. I can't stop looking at them when you are teaching. It's really distracting actually. They're just so pretty.... (trailing off)... I hope that wasn't creepy."


Later that day, in Latin class:

7th grade girl 1: Miss Stearns, that's the outfit you wore the first day of school.

7th grade girl 2: But she had different shoes on.

7th grade girl 3: I like the skirt you wore the second day of school--the tan one with little flowers.

Sensible, tomboyish 7th grade girl 4: Tempus fugit, Miss Stearns....

Today























During section today, one kid repeatedly referred to having "gold in your blood" (he was talking about Plato's gold-souled people).

Also: I hate Target. Always, at some point in my trip, I am inches away from crying. This time it was because I was lugging a giant bag of toilet paper while being sent in vain by various employees (when I could find them; when I couldn't, I tried the emergency phone thing and that didn't even work) to different corners of the store to find a thermometer.

In good news, I found a thermometer with which I will nurse my hypochondria. I also got a hot pink tennis grip, which makes me fairly happy.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Status Update

Emily is too scared to work on her dissertation proposal.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Fr. Schall on libraries without readers:

Recently a man in our Community died. He was a good scholar. He had collected quite an impressive library over the years. It contained all sorts of books. After his death, his books were offered to the various university libraries in case they needed them or did not have them. After this offer, they were given to any of us who might want any of them. Personal libraries come to an end with the lives of those who put them together in the first place. The books, or lack of same, on one’s shelves at point of death probably reveal as much about the man as anything else, except perhaps his letters (or e-mails?).
...
Our minds are made for the whole. One must be careful also not to become one’s own librarian, which is what concerned Seneca. There is a difference between a book collector, to whom we often owe a debt for keeping fine books that no one else knows about, and a book reader. Of course, there is nothing wrong with being both a collector and a reader of what one collects. Books are a sign that we are aware of the existence of more than ourselves.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Before Sunrise













































Besides the fact that it (really) involves meeting people on trains, I mean, meeting people on trains is a crucial part of the story, and I really hate meeting people when I'm traveling (possibly because of the type of people who are often traveling, especially in hostels in Europe--well off high school kids who want to drink in a new city, and lots of people who are really excited about meeting other people while they're traveling--or possibly because you just meet them and then never see them again, which is an indescribably painful idea to me [another key aspect of the story--look at me not spoiling anything at the moment!]), but besides all of this, Before Sunrise is charming. It is basically a conversation (sometimes a little self-consciously deep and disconnected, like one interesting, insightful story on top of another), a deep conversation in which both characters (the boy has a smarmy goatee, but maybe that's just 1995) share their thoughts and reveal themselves. The girl is romantic and possibly secretly an ax-murderer (I am still scared of her), and the boy is cynical because he's just had his heart broken (although deep down, he's every bit as romantic). The scene in which they pretend to call their friends and tell them about their experience is absolutely adorable.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

From an Email from Ilana (Age 17)

So yesterday, I hit a rabbit whilst driving. It was a difficult experience because I stopped to look at it and then I felt really bad. When I was telling Mom and Dad about it when I got home, Dad said "why didn't you bring it home so I could eat it?"

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

The Death of Summer

Best line from Obama's speech: "Medicare is a sacred trust that must be passed down to future generations." This reminded me of something like Burke on the rights of Englishman, which come almost sacredly from our fathers. I don't know what to say, except that turning health care into a moral issue misses morality and virtue. Our faith is a sacred trust that must be passed down to future generations. Politics are important, but let's not turn political action into moral action (not that they're entirely separated either).

ALSO, I've had my first sections of the year. Today, one girl was trying to pronounce Thrasymachus, an admittedly difficult word. In the space of about one minute, she pronounced it as both "Thrasimiac" and "Theramayus." I wish she would've kept talking.

There was a boy in one of my sections unlike any other kid I've had in class before. Actually, he was unlike any person I'd ever met before. Every time he opened his mouth, it was to give a speech, complete with either an introductory analogy or an introductory joke. He went off for several minutes about California and gold mining and finding the nugget of wealth in Plato's dialogues. Basically, the kid wants to be a politician. And every sentence he utters is a political argument. I don't actually have any idea what I'm going to do with him.

Monday, September 7, 2009

Back!

























From delightful adventures (including holding the tents posts up in the wind and rain) with Stearns, Whigwham and our parish Classicist.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

On Shoveling Pureed Carrots Mixed with Oatmeal into A Child's Mouth

Mixing the oatmeal into the carrots reminded me of my mother feeding Ilana when she was little. That oatmeal was always intriguing to me--light and airy, sort of like snow that isn't cold.

Well, we battled--the seven-month-old kid and me. I sang to him (Edelweiss and Jingle Bells) and yelled at him (especially when he fussed and smeared the carrots all over his face and hair and shirt and all over me). But actually it was helpful when he cried, because then his mouth was open and I could slip some more carrots in. Well, I didn't know how much to feed him, but the darling six-year-old girl kept encouraging me: "You're doing good; just a little more;...just a little more."

When I showed his mother how much he'd eaten (by how much was remaining in the baby food jar), she was very surprised. She said she'd never been able to get him to eat that much. Alas, the baby is fat already, and I had just forced him to eat more than he wanted...

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Sublime Things

Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater
The way the sun comes in the Pantheon
Keira Knightley's green dress in Atonement


























I stand by this list. (Okay, so the word, "sublime" is a little bit of a stretch here, but not much.)