We had a department reception this week, which felt like one big conversational minefield. Due to an unfortunate quirk of demographics, I'm one of the senior graduate students in history of science, which means that a lot of other students keep asking me about the dissertation-writing process. I don't have the heart to tell them that, at this point, dissertation-writing involves more watching television and baking muffins than it does actual research and writing.
After forty-five minutes of nodding vaguely when people said things like "so if you're not teaching these days, what do you do? You just get up in the morning and start writing?" it was a relief to run in to Daniel. Daniel's in my cohort, he took his exams last spring and submitted a prospectus and spent the summer researching (although his summer was in Paris, while too much of mine was in Worcester and Baltimore). I liked Daniel's take on the dissertation process: "there's no time, you know? I have to make breakfast in the mornings, and then read the newspaper, and I have to go to the gym every day. Every day! Because I'm still on the market, you know? If I'm going to find a boyfriend in San Francisco, I have to look good. So there's that, and then when it's nice in the afternoon it would be such a waste to be working instead of enjoying the weather." He says he used to run instead of going to the gym, but his time in the army just killed his knees. "I gave my country my cartilage, you know? It's only fair."
Daniel was, sadly, the exception. I got stuck in a corner listening to a visiting scholar talk about dealing with his newly-adolescent children. "It's like a second birthing, only it's harder because I'm involved in this one. I was involved in the first one, I mean, I was there for the first, I was in the room, and I cut the umbilical cord, but it wasn't my womb being stretched, so this is very different." That was when I started making excuses about having to leave, having a bus to catch.
We had a lot of grapefruit growing up, so much that my mom bought special spoons with jagged edges that helped you get every last bit out. Those things were great, except when we hadn't run the dishwasher in a while and had to eat yogurt with them. Every year the marching band had a citrus sale to raise money for whatever trip we were taking. This involved a series of complex turf negotiations within each neighborhood, over where exactly Cockenoe ended and Wyandanch began and so forth. The key, though, was to get out the first afternoon and head south to the vast, wealthy, childless waste by the bay, where people like Captain Kangaroo had tennis courts in their yard. You could sell eight boxes per house down there if you were lucky.
The fruit would invariably arrive on the coldest day in early December, and delivery was a bitch. You could either wear gloves, which made gripping the twenty-pound boxes next to impossible, or go without, which led to raw and bleeding hands after a few hours. Some people wouldn't be home, leading to day after day of return trips until you finally caught them. When it was all done, though, we'd have a box or two of grapefruit in the garage, and the challenge was to eat it all before it turned into booze. My favorite was to peel the grapefruit and eat it like a tangerine. Of course, peeling a grapefruit is rather similar to peeling a basketball, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you're a slightly off adolescent of single-minded determination. But maybe this practice is more widespread than I though, and the oranges are simply upsizing to compete.
I don't think I've had a grapefruit this century.
I sort of don't want to vote in the Democratic presidential primary. I bet this makes me a bad person.
But let me explain! It's not that I don't care; I do, I truly do. But the amount I prefer any one of the candidates over any of the others is vanishingly small in comparison to how much I don't want to see Bush reelected. At this point in the game, I will happily cast my ballot for anybody the Democrats put up for election. A taxachusetts librocrat? No problem! A military man with no national political experience? Sure, why not? A former governor with an anger-management problem and a little-too-thick neck? Great! Bring it on. It's all good.
So I've decided, I'm willing to let the internet tell me how to vote. I've tried the Presidential Candidate Selector and the Political Compass, and I keep getting different answers each time. I think my only real solution is to rely on that most beloved of American political traditions -- Whack-a-Mole.
When did oranges become larger than grapefruit?
I was at the supermarket the other night, taking a break from looking for fresh coriander in order to stand around in a stupor, when I noticed the oranges: barrels of vicious, knobbly things the size of an infant's head. I have known such oranges before -- their skin is the better part of a centimeter thick, their flesh pale and mostly bitter -- but not in such a freakish size. They were navel oranges, I think, but navel oranges are not always so monstrous. At least, they were not in my youth.
Off to the right sat several crates of yellow grapefruit, smaller than the oranges. I spent a few minutes puzzling over this, but was then overwhelmed with more pressing concerns. Like, who eats all these crates of grapefruit? I ate them when I was little, because my dad ate them, and they made a good breakfast. But I always assumed that eating grapefruit was sort of unusual. Was I wrong? Are we turning into a nation of grapefruit eaters? Or have we always been?
The BBC obviously understands which bloodlines drive the fate of America. Check out the "In Pictures" feature in this story. Keith Wilding is my cousin, and Heather is his wife. For some reason they have chosen to move to New Hampshire, which gives them more power than most of us. It does not, however, seem to make them photograph particularly well.
[The BBC seems to have removed this particular feature. Suspicious?]
Busy day in the news, for all that it's only quarter past nine. Clark trampled his opponents in Dixville Notch, Johnny Depp got a Best Actor nomination for his drag-queen pirate, and researchers at UCSF have concluded that black-tar heroin helps keep its users from contracting HIV by making needle re-use more hassle.
Out of all of those stories, though, the Oscars one is the only one I feel any personal investment in. (Although honestly, I've learned more about heroin in this morning's news reports than in all the previous twenty-seven years of my life. Does this mean I lead a sheltered life?) At least I've seen more than half of the Best Picture nominees, which I think was not the case last year. That's a fluke, though. Of the fourteen movies that placed people in the Best Lead and Best Supporting actor/actress categories, I've seen two.
I'm going to have to throw a pirate-themed Oscars party just to make myself feel less out of the loop. Pirates and hobbits, maybe.
The race for the Democratic nomination has gotten all crazy in the last two weeks, and that's all right by me. I wasn't particularly thrilled with the way it was going at the end of 2003, and I was glad to see some of Howard Dean's lustre fading under scrutiny. And I was glad to see John Kerry, someone I liked a lot before he drove his campaign into the ground last spring, make something of a rebound. And, honestly, that speech Dean gave (you may have heard it) was pretty damn funny.
There are some signs that Gov. Dean has recovered somewhat since bottoming out last week, and I suppose that's fair. His message has attracted a strong core of solid supporters, and it would have been sad for that to melt away entirely after a single setback. But so much of the media -- accused by many of doing in Dean's campaign with negative coverage -- has let the doctor off the hook by focuing exclusively on the scream. Dean was hemorrhaging support in Iowa for days before the caucuses; indeed it was that loss of support that led to the scream, not vice versa. By over-crediting the scream for Dean's drop in the polls, could the media have convinced people to stand by Dean through this rough patch, rather than re-examining his positions before voting? I don't know. But those Dean supporters who rail against the media for harping on a truly funny moment may want to reconsider their positions.
The valid criticisms of Gov. Dean and his campaign are still valid, of course. Saletan has a good rundown of those. In a nutshell, I worry that Dean, in his understandable outrage and oppoisition to the Bush Administration, has only further polarized political debate, to the point that subtlety and nuance from either side are dismissed as inconsistency. Last week, Dean assured supporters, "I lead with my heart and not my head." I can't think of a more powerful condemnation of President Bush.