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Two points:

The only foods at the grocery store tonight are the ones I gave up for lent.

I stopped washing my hair, since Connie Britton doesn't.

Jeremy Deller: Joy in People

Francisco and I went to an exhibit of Jeremy Deller's work at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis (a very small museum in midtown). Deller is British, which is the angle I used on Francisco to get him to go (he's not a big contemporary art fan). Deller stages events, like a procession in Manchester and a historical reenactment of a British miners' strike in the 80s, which he also filmed. The reenactment was abrasive--the film showed cops with plastic shields beating protestors (when I think of reenactments, I think of events that happened so long ago as to be detached and romanticized--not so with the miners' strike reenactment).

(The pictures here are from an exhibit he held in his parent's house about 10 years ago.)



The impression that I got about him from the exhibit is that he is a political revolutionary who loves British music, especially Manchester bands, and probably drugs. It doesn't seem like an unusual type.

One piece of artwork was a collection of witty things that were written on the bathroom wall at (I think) the British Library. Another followed the idea of "twinning cities" by making a map of Iraq with the names of American towns and vice versa.  

Conceptual art is fascinating to me, but I don't find it to be beautiful.

Disability and Basketball

(via Andrew Sullivan)

I love my friends: just as when I was looking for housing a year and a half ago, I had several guest bedroom offers from my friends (and several keys to their houses on my key chain), so when I was looking for a wedding dress this year, no fewer than three of my friends offered to lend me their dresses (one is hanging in my closet right now). One dress is a size 2, so that friend either is seriously divorced from reality or has an overly ambition sense of how much weight I can lose in the next few months.

This is just to say: my friends are incredibly generous people.

No Fond Return of Love

Barbara Pym is so witty and funny, and this is the wittiest and funniest of her books that I've read so far. I read so many lines out loud to Francisco that we just gave up and I read the rest of the book out loud to him. (It wasn't hard to convince him, since, as I've noted here before, he's an anglophile, and Pym is British.)

Like a ridiculous poem, Pym takes almost nonsensical themes and repeats them and plays with them until you're in tears. She mocks each character, making the most serious ones look like clowns. The line from which the book is named,

'Of course,' she went on, 'those are the people from whom one asks no return of love, if you see what I mean. Just to be allowed to love them is enough.'

is said by Dulcie, an older woman who becomes an utterly creepy and hilarious, yet somehow still sympathetic, stalker of Aylwin Forbes and, by extension, his whole family. (Really, who hasn't stalked someone and found out far too much information, delighting in each piece uncovered? Okay, okay, maybe it's just me.)

While Pym has sharp, delightful wit, the ending was weak and unsatisfying. Alwyn Forbes finally takes a wife (well, another wife after his first one and he left each other) and his choice is unbelievable--the character his is would have never chosen the woman he chose. Pym's quick turn of phrase doesn't save anything:

What a surprise it would be, not least to his family and to Dulcie herself, who had so often urged him to make a 'suitable' marriage, if, when he was free, this very marriage should come about! Yet here he was being true to type after all. For what might seem to the rest of the world an eminently 'suitable' marriage to a woman no longer very young, who could help him with his work, now seemed to him the most unsuitable that could be imagined, simply because it had never occurred to him that he could love such a person. It was all most delightfully incongruous. Just the sort of thing Aylwin Forbes would do.

Oh no. Just because you try to confuse me, Barbara Pym, doesn't mean I'll buy this nonsense. Just because Aylwin Forbes is handsome and smart, doesn't mean every old maid will swoon when he comes to propose. And really?! He's thinking about Mansfield Park on the way over? I doubt it.


(Hopkins reviews it here (and says quite rightly, "Miss Pym doesn't have the gumption to see her satire to its logical conclusion."); I also wrote about Pym's Quartet in Autumn, Excellent Women, A Few Green Leaves.)

Rambling

Yesterday I went to Barnes and Noble to browse and spend a gift certificate from Christmas. Boy, there is a cottage industry of Jane Austen-derivative books--every fifth book in the "fiction and literature" section referred to Austen in some way. I admit--one time, when I was very young, I bought a Jane Austen rip off. But it was written by her great niece, so that somehow seemed legitimate. But I didn't care for the book.

I don't care for new book stores and almost never go to them. There was loads of contemporary low-brow fiction and "the classics" and almost nothing in between. It just wasn't the sort of place where you could discover things or where you're told by someone smarter and better-read people than you what you should want to read. And of course: the cardinal sin: there was no Laurie Colwin nor Barbara Pym. Honestly, I searched high and low and couldn't even find an essay section.

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Okay, so, I'm not thrilled about having meat billed as one thing when it's really another, but if we're okay with eating cows, chickens, goats, pigs, and deer, what's the enormous problem with eating horses?

Nicole Kidman's Klimt Oscar dress. Klimt is the king of gold.

What I'm Eating.3

I can't get enough peas this winter. I've been eating them by the bowl.


(What I'm Eating.1 and .2)

Amish Romance Novels

On Amish romance novels:

If the Mennonite and Amish have anything to offer about romance, it’s this: a heavy book of death and torture, a love letter to all their pursuers, their captors and executioners. Consider the love language of these people something similar to a moaning, choking agony addressed at the universe. Call it holy desperation. Call it devotion. Call it belief in inherent dignity. This is real Amish romance, as real as it gets, a three-hundred-year love affair with life, with the sacredness of life. Forget bonnet books. Forget modernity. It’s all white noise inside the roar of eternity.

Writes my father, pertinent to much and also nearly nothing at all, “Amish wives and husbands will continue to give the world children, trained and formed, who are unable to kill other humans and who are unable to kill for the state.”

 (Via Hopkins). Wonderful, beautiful point. (Although plenty of religions that don't ban war celebrate and respect their martyrs. But still, great point.)

However, that's just the ending. The beginning starts with a description of the sub-genre of contemporary Christian fiction, Amish Romance novels. I have totally either read some of these Amish romance novels that Rachel Yoder. The weird thing about this review is that the author seems to think that the creation or readership of Amish romance novels has something to do with Amish people, either as producers or consumers of this literature.

I honestly doubt that that's the case--I always imagined they were written by someone in the movement of Christian culture that sought to take everything being done in the secular world and do it "Christianly"--music, books, paintings (this is where Thomas Kinkaid came from, right?), bracelets (WWJD), etc. And I always imagined they were read by the consumers of culture who shared that perspective: Christian romance can set itself in the Wild West, on the Canadian frontier, in Bible times with leather sandals, or in Lancaster county. It doesn't make much difference. And it doesn't say very much about the setting that it was chosen as a setting for a Christian romance novel.

(The author of Rachel's Secret, which Rachel Yoder refers to in her piece, also wrote books set in Ireland, the mountains, early America, a tiny Irish village during the potato famine, and a little mining town. Beverly Lewis, who wrote a trilogy that includes The Shunning, also wrote series called "Abram's Daughter series," "Annie's People series," "The Courtship of Nellie Fisher series," "Home to Hickory Hollow Series," etc. Now, I'm too lazy to look up where each of these is actually set, but you get the idea: it's set in the past. Which is romantic.)

Happy Birthday Mama Leopard!

This blog has often benefited from Mama Leopard's wry and incisive wit. She is a strong, opinionated lady, and (if he'd come to America 200 years later) Tocqueville could have been referring to Mama Leopard when he wrote about American women:

As for myself, I do not hesitate to avow that although the women of the United States are confined within the narrow circle of domestic life, and their situation is in some respects one of extreme dependence, I have nowhere seen woman occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked, now that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.

Rant

I'm in a very ranty mood. I have a lot of opinions on almost every topic (and the topics I don't care about, I passionately don't care about). So I asked Francisco for a random rant topic. Today's was fake British accents (someone told him that he had one--a slight British accent, not a fake British accent).

I have an opinion about this. No American, no matter how long he or she studied abroad in England, should have any sort of British accent. Eliot affected one many years ago. Many of my best friends affect one today. People: you don't (or shouldn't) pick up an accent by living somewhere for a year. Just scare it away and refuse to let it come back. There's really no excuse.

Years ago, I spent a week in England with a girl who picked an accent up while we were there. She has it to this day.

I know a British accent makes British people sound smarter than other people. But a fake British accent on Americans just makes them sound weirder than other people.

* I once knew a girl who claimed to have a Minnesotan accent (she didn't have one). I naively asked how much time she spent in Minnesota. She said, "Three months." Oh my.

** Your rant suggestions are always welcome!

A Random Assortment

~ The china above is the most beautiful one I found and the only one that Francisco and I even remotely agreed on. (I'm a green-flowers-all-over-the-plate sort of girl and Francisco's a white-plate-with-a-silver-boarder sort of guy.) I was bemoaning the fact that it was far more than we could ever register for (the bread and butter plate alone is $120--and I think that the rest of it might be sold out). And then I said, "Oh well, I guess I'll have to just pin it as a consolation." Francisco: "You're such a cliche." Ha!

(I don't know if we can register for china: the less expensive stuff is boring and the expensive stuff is expensive! Thoughts?)

Oh: also--it's photographed with a carp! That's a bit much. Although those fish always do look hungry, so maybe it's appropriate..

~ For Diana: from Prince Philip's funniest gaffes:

"To Cayman Islanders: 'Aren’t most of you descended from pirates?'"

~ On granola, for Papa Leopard.

"Born in the better-eating movement of the late 19th century and revived a half-century ago as an earnest health food, granola is suddenly sowing its wild oats, in variations that are lavish, whimsical and sometimes unapologetically fattening."

 (When was granola ever not unapologetically fattening? I mean, it's good fat, but it's not like granola's made out of celery.)

On one variation on granola:

"It’s green and orange and yellow and blue. When Mr. Choi first went to his Sunny Spot team and suggested a fresh take on granola, he told them he wanted to see color. 'It’s always just so brown,' he said. 'Why can’t we make it really, really festive?'

He also told them to shake up expectations. 'I wanted it to be this bowl of twists and turns, instead of just one scoop after another,' he said. 'I don’t understand the process of eating things just to submit yourself to boredom.'"

Oh my. A little offensive. I like sometimes eating things with one taste and no "twists and turns"--like iceberg or crispix. Also: only one of the foods in the picture at the top of the article is recognizable to me as granola.

Also, funny:

 "Granola has traded in the bulky sweater for a little black dress."

~ The Post Office is launching a clothing line?!

~ Yesterday was Auden's birthday, so there was lots of good Auden stuff on the internet.

~ What if the languages and animals disappear? Things like this stress me out. How do we pick what survives, since there's a finite amount of resources? What do we lose when languages die? Somehow these two things are conflating in my mind.

Quote

Marriage advice from a friend, who shall remain nameless:

"Alas, it is all so damn serious [the fiscal cliff]. I hope your engagement is not so, that is, not serious. Marriage is comedy, not tragedy. What's a death wish here & there for your spouse? It's the perfect complement to sex."

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Who doesn't? (wrap their scarf around their hair) (We're in the midst of a snowy day here; I feel like I'm the only one at the office.)

Friday Phone Dump

A pretty church I visit sometimes in STL:

I love these angels in the rafters:

I've been wanting to try brown-sugar broiled grapefruit for some time. It took Hopkins and @mirielmargaret to push me over the edge:

Verdict: It was good, but it was so soft that it was hard to cut. I prefer it the plain old way.

I was driving in rural Missouri with Norleans looking for houses (for her, not for me):

And then, BOOM, there was New Town, MO, a planned community by the same guy who did Celebration!, FL. (I guess it doesn't really have an exclamation point, but I think the exclamation point is fitting.)

 

I have a lot to say, namely that it's super silly, but I'll save it for later. The church. The church is the funniest part. Later. 

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"hope some job shows up for you." --JVS (as an aside in an email)

That does seem to be the right way to approach it, doesn't it?

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Okay, so an hour and twenty minutes may be a bit too long to watch sushi on tv, but this film captures someone doing his proper job well and passionately, and there's nothing like it. Jiro says, "I feel ecstatic all day. I love making sushi" and "When I'm making the sushi, I feel victorious." Being successful is clearly not about money or about having to work less (Jiro is 85 and uninterested in working fewer hours)-- it is about making better and better sushi with better fish, an opportunity that achieving success provides. Working at the high level that he does allows Jiro to charge a lot and use the finest ingredients. His excellence comes from doing the same thing over and over and improving it gradually. He has perfected his craft, but never sits back and coasts.

Making sushi is a tradition in his family--it is a skill that is being passed from father to son. One of Jiro's sons is still his apprentice; another has started his own sushi restaurant, which is the mirror image of his father's.  

One complaint: Jiro said: "I make the sushi different sizes depending on the customer's gender." Gosh, I would be pissed off if I went to Japan to eat his sushi (at more than 300 bucks per meal) and got less food because I"m a girl--I'm pretty sure I can keep up with the men when it comes to food.

A Random Assortment

From the Central Library

~ Have I mentioned that I love Connie Britton? I watch Nashville religiously. It doesn't really matter whether it's good or not (I think it is), because she's in it--that's really all that matters (via Sequins). On Friday Night Lights:

The show ended after five years, and walking away from the role turned out to be wrenching for Britton. “I’m still just in denial and having an identity crisis,” Britton told her friend Chelsea Handler on her talk show, shortly after shooting the last episode. “ ’Cause who am I, if I’m not Tami Taylor?” Britton gave an elaborate shrug. 

 And I love her confidence:

Britton, who was briefly married right out of college, is single now, but she is usually dating someone. “In my experience of watching Connie Britton’s dating life, it has not been Connie getting beaten out by 25-year-old girls, let’s leave it at that,” says the producer Sarah Aubrey, a friend. If Britton bristles at characterizations of a 40-year-old woman as losing her appeal, it’s because she thinks those assumptions are off-base. “Because frankly I’ve had a different experience, as a single woman,” she said. “Younger men and all that.” It’s not that she has a particular pattern of dating younger men, she clarified. “Let’s put it this way: The older you get, the easier it is to date younger men.” She laughed. “There are more of them.” 

 I briefly toyed with the idea of playing a cougar, but it didn't work out so well: the "younger man" just wanted to talk about college.

~ Guys: Newborn photography is the. creepiest. thing. Like, if you want to scare me at Halloween, just take me into a room full of newborn photographs (see the second picture in this blog post). Why can't they just leave their clothes on and stick them in their parents' arms?

~ But this is amazing: 13-year-old newborn photographs.

~ Ah, Lloyd Dobler, what a darling guy.

~ I love STL. Here's a great list of things to do (via Gypsy). The only error is--all the cool things in STL are incredibly spread out. There's no way it could be shoved into 24 hours because of the sheer immensity of the place, land-wise. So, friends, come visit! Preferably for longer than 24 hours.

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Also: My roommate and I discovered that the two bags of M and M's that have been hanging out on top of our refrigerator for weeks belong to neither of us. Thrilling! Who is leaving us candy? Please continue!

Applications

I found a real live college with a "Politics and Government Program" in Colorado.

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Also: the #1 Greek reggae band (?!) was just playing on 88.1, a truly great independent radio station.

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I, no kidding, signed up for something that involves me being cheerful to people at 7:45 in the morning.

Central Library.2

Not only are the ceilings incredible, but so are the windows. There are tons and they're big.

Photo credit: Francisco

This is a sort of horrible quote about books from Andrew Carnegie, who gave the money for the library. (Maybe it's not horrible: maybe it's only ambiguous--"they only help those who help themselves" in the sense that they only help those who help themselves and not the people who don't help themselves? or they only help and not hurt those who help themselves? or both?)

Central Library

St. Louis's Central Library has been closed since I've arrived in St. Louis and only recently reopened. I'm so glad I made the trip--the inside is gorgeous. The building was designed by Cass Gilbert and built in 1912. The outside is fine--although, as usual, too low to the ground for my taste: my East Coast sensibilities just long for a big rotunda slapped on top.



This is the main reading room. It's an awe-inspiring room--all of the ceilings in the place are incredible.

I think that the renovations are very tactfully done: the library certainly isn't all restored with original furnishings; rather, it's updated and modern, and the new art and the old art, and the new shelves and the old shelves are tastefully combined.

A Letter I Really Sent

Dear Mr. De la Renta,

My name is Emily Hale. I’m writing because I think that you make sublime green dresses. And there’s nothing in the world that I like more than a green dress (especially one that you made around 2010 for 7990 dollars--it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen). 

Upon visiting a Frank Lloyd Wright house in St. Louis, I learned that Frank Lloyd Wright designed a house for a middle-class artistic couple in order to prove that his designs could be accessible to people in all price ranges. (Honestly, I’m not sure he proved his point: it seems like a luxury that most people can’t afford to get a bed in the shape of a parallelogram.) 

I got engaged this Christmas while ice skating in the mountains. Rather than wear some silly puffy white dress down the aisle, I would love to wear a green gown, preferably designed by you. Sadly, I’m just emerging from seven years of graduate school and don’t have loads of money for a dress.

So I’ll come to my point: I was wondering if you could make me a Usonian Oscar de la Renta green dress for my July wedding this summer. I could pay you probably even as much as a thousand dollars.

My favorite greens are Kelly to Emerald—really anything that’s green with blue and not green with yellow. [I will omit my physical description of myself here.] My fiancé is wearing morning dress. He’s very fashionable, but, sadly, he’s also quite an anglophile.

I admire your work. Thank you for reading my request.

Yours,

Emily Hale

P.S. I am a political theorist, so if you’d like to barter a gown for some political theory made to order, I’d be happy to write you up your own. I think it would be interesting to do something on the political theory of fashion.

Another Gem from Marriage Prep

From the teacher: "Another good thing about NFP is that both the man and the woman are involved with their fertility as a couple. Well, for the man it's mostly only putting stickers on the chart."

Midtown

St. Francis Xavier, near SLU.





The Fox, above, and some building on SLU's campus, below.

The State of the Union

Such a tricky project of making the country sound like it's doing almost miraculously well and, at the same time, making it sound like it's about to fall off some cliff of climate change and joblessness if children aren't guaranteed the right to preschool:

Why would that be a partisan issue, helping folks refinance? Right now, overlapping regulations keep responsible young families from buying their first home. What's holding us back? Let's streamline the process and help our economy grow. Now, these initiatives in manufacturing, energy, infrastructure, housing, all these things will help entrepreneurs and small-business owners expand and create new jobs. But none of it will matter unless we also equip our citizens with the skills and training to fill those jobs.
(APPLAUSE)
And that has to start at the earliest possible age. You know, study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road.
But today, fewer than three in ten 4-year-olds are enrolled in a high-quality preschool program. Most middle-class parents can't afford a few hundred bucks a week for private preschool. And for poor kids who need help the most, this lack of access to preschool education can shadow them for the rest of their lives. So, tonight, I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America.

Where are the other seven in ten 4-year-olds?  In a low-quality preschool program? With babysitters? Sure--learning is great. I don't know if learning at the earliest possible age is universally great. I don't know that kids who are staying at home with their mothers aren't learning. I just don't know about this: it seems to me that there are other ways to encourage learning in 4-year-olds than shipping them off to preschool. (Also: preschool is important because it will "equip our citizens with the skills and training to fill those jobs." I think work is pretty important and education is pretty important, but all education, and especially preschool education, isn't vocational education.)

This seems wise:

So here's an idea that Governor Romney and I actually agreed on last year: Let's tie the minimum wage to the cost of living, so that it finally becomes a wage you can live on.

I remember asking my dad about this when I was little--it just doesn't seem to me that minimum wage works as a federal decision, since cost of living varies so much from city to city. 

Some of the transitions were unclear to me: talking about Newtown and gun violence smack in the middle of voting reform to avoid long lines? I have to say, I don't see the connection. Congress needs to vote (yes) on gun control measures and individuals need to vote in presidential elections? Tenuous.

Also: I thought he was going to talk more about the environment and gay marriage. Or was that just what people were hoping he would talk about?

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Mardi Gras and the State of the Union. Thankfully, mardi gras won, as well it should.

Gems from Marriage Prep

The teacher: "Think of the difference between someone saying, 'This is my friend; this is my boyfriend; this is my fiance; this is my husband..."
Francisco: "This is Wittgenstein's ordinary language philosophy going on."

The teacher: "Each sacrament has an outward sign. In the case of baptism, it is the water; in the case of the eucharist, it's the consecrated host; in the case of marriage, many people think it is the rings or the unity candle, but it's actually the couple themselves."
(Incidentally, I don't think that's exactly right, but can you believe that some people think it's the unity candle?!)

A Random Assortment

~ Here's some lovely modernist architectural photography (by Ezra Stoller) (via Francisco).

~ I'd like to submit and entry for this, but the picture of my kindergarten graduation isn't online. I'm pretty sure I insisted on a graduation setup of old books, old reading glasses, and an antique-looking candle.

~ Woah--Williamsport is the 10th most expensive city to buy a six-pack of Heineken. (I told you guys that Williamsport is a city!)

~ I don't know what to say about this and this, except it offends my liberated-woman sensibilities. Oh, and: It's super weird that the men who do more around the house and have less sex: "generally reported less work-life conflict and were scored slightly higher for wellbeing overall." Perhaps the lesson is that regardless of the amount of sex you have, at the end of the day commitment to your home and sacrifice are good things. We shouldn't just let women have a corner on caring for their family in the home.

~ On the medicalization of disability (and specifically, of psychiatry).

~ Simcha on lenten rookie mistakes. I love this because, still being a rookie at Catholicism, I've had several of these urges. Some I most identify with:

Giving Up All The Things!!!  Don't forget:  even though it's Lent, you still have to live the rest of your life.  So it's probably not wise to take on such a complicated set of obligations and observances that you will need to hire a monk to follow you around, reminding you that you have exactly four minutes to make supper or earn a living before you're due for your next spiritual reading, or  to pray anther five decades of the rosary, volunteer another half hour at the soup kitchen, say a blessing before, during, and after sneezing, and put a fresh set of dried peas in your shoes, all on four hours of sleep without a pillow and after a breakfast consisting of half a prune.  Just pick one or two things that you can reasonably stick with, or you will burn out and/or drop dead.
Giving up the thing that makes you bearable  Lent is about you doing sacrifices, not making everybody else suffer while they endure your enduring your sacrifice.  If your family sits you down 48 hours into Lent and presents you with a court order demanding that you start smoking or drinking coffee again, then have mercy and listen to them. 

Early on, my friend JL, Fr. OP's brother, just straight up told me--it doesn't work as well if you try to give up everything. You just end up not giving up any one thing very well. I think that's true--at least pick one thing to thoroughly give up.

Also--I always struggled to find something to give up that was an actual sacrifice, but that still allowed me to be productive with my work. Because I don't work very well when I'm not comfortable and happy--if I can't ever listen to music or drink coffee, etc.

The Kreeger

Francisco got us Groupon tickets to the Kreeger museum in Georgetown, which we visited the last time i was in DC. I invited several people to come along (Hopkins, Stearns, Sequins), but they said no immediately, without even looking the museum up! (Actually, I think they just had other plans.)

I love small museums in houses. While I am a defender of modernism, this wasn't my favorite house. It seemed like it was designed as a museum--there were tall ceilings and almost no furniture, and there was carpet on the walls. The carpet just seemed odd and 60s-ish. I prefer to be house-museums to be absurdly over-the-top with baroque side tables everywhere. This Philip Johnson house was the picture of minimalism and restraint.

(The two pictures above were my favorites.)

The thing about the museum is that it had works by many well-known artists, but they were quirkier pictures by those artists. (Above: Chagall.) For instance, I would've never in a million years guessed it, but this one is a Mondrian:

Better known as the guy who does this:

I did love this handrail and the work behind it.

There were also quite a few modernist sculptures. Here's Francisco's favorite:

And here's mine:

(It was fascinating to view the female curves which twisted and turned and were visible from all sides.)

Tonight, one of the communities that I'm part of in STL, the L'arche community, celebrated my engagement. After a wonderful chicken curry dinner, they prayed for me, sang a song of blessing over me and shared advice for me as I get ready for this new community living experience. In one sense, you wonder how a bunch of single people can give marriage advice, but it was the most profound advice, all emerging from their experience of life together.

They talked about how my mandate of knowing, loving, and serving God would be enriched by my knowing, loving, and serving Francisco. A said that as my time at L'arche is service now, I'm moving into a time where my first commitment will be to my family, and where serving Francisco will be one of the ways that I serve God.

They gave me three keys for marriage--the phrases, "I love you, "I'm sorry," and "Help me." I love the L'arche picture of mutual help: for instance, J works hard and often puts away dishes--but when he can't reach something, he quickly and unashamedly asks for help.

I'm humbled by the honest and genuine way they live in community, offering their strengths and their weaknesses to each other equally. It's quite a lesson for me: I tend to try to hide my weaknesses and struggles and pretend they aren't there.

Francisco, Computer Whisperer

One day, after flickering for a while, my screen flickered off and refused to flicker back on. I took it to my computer repair place, which I trust, and the man said that he was pretty sure it was the motherboard, so I should just buy a new laptop. I did (incidentally, the one I bought was touted as "so thin you could shave a badger with it" in an online review,. which is delightful), but I also brought the old one to Francisco for a second opinion.

After trying something that seemed to me to be an attempt at magic (pulsing the power button ten times in ten seconds and then depressing it for 30), and seeing no change, he opened it up.

My laptop is a rare hybrid Mac-Lenovo (which is to say, embarrassingly, on a whim, I stuck an apple sticker on the back). I'm very attached to my gigantic laptop. Like a baby, it comes with me everywhere. Unlike a baby, it plays me tv, music, my yoga video, the weather, movies, gchats, blogs, and email (not to mention, it makes phone calls and video calls). Which is to say, it is arguably better, at least in some ways, than a baby.

Seeing Francisco open it up was a little scary, like open heart surgery (picture here). But there was no alternative.

Turns out, it was a good move--Francisco figured out what was wrong, fixed it, and my laptop is as good as new. This is a great skill to be marrying into.

Penguin Parade!

On several Sundays during the winter, the St. Louis Zoo hosts a Penguin Parade! I have a weakness for parades and for zoos, so I joined loads of little kids and a couple of grandparents to watch the penguins march down the parade route, stopping to interact with people (and scare some little children) (the penguins did, not me) along the way.



There were two kinds of penguins. They walked slowly and sometimes just stood still until the parade organizers nudged them forward.

They really did scare little kids: the little boy in front of me was watching one penguin, while another moved to within a couple of inches of his face. I gently pointed out the penguin that was close to him and he started screaming and looked at me with a face that said that this whole business was my fault.



If I had kids, I think I would take them every week to see the penguins.

Of course, it would be for their amusement, rather than my own.

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Teaching Aristotle and MacIntyre in one day--does it get any better?

Sea Lions

I was stressed out this week. As the one wedding book I own, which Francisco found on the "take me" table in his apartment, says (I paraphrase)--the wedding expectations of the culture create bridezillas and then criticize you for being one.

Anyways, to get away from the wedding stress and career stress, I went to (you can probably guess) the zoo.



Swimming things are the best de-stressors. I rarely feel as peaceful as I do when watching the sea lions swim. They're like muscular torpedoes, twirling and playing in the water. Their eyes seem to be closed--how do they know to turn at just the right moment? Their long noses and whiskers lead them souring through the water.



They often swim upside down, just bragging about how effortless this all is for them. They turn at almost 90 degree angles, slowing from time to time to tip their nose out of the water for a breath.

I love the sense of wonder of everyone watching--even adults are entranced and their excitement slips out in exclamations.