Even When I'm Sad.

Bea Arthur can make me laugh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHd3MrMbnzY

Tara.

Yesterday, we stopped at a Mid-Way for lunch. Predictably, a little boy materialized out of the bushes and tried to talk me into giving him some food or money or anything I had in my pockets. He was really funny, and really determined. After 20 minutes, I would have broken down and given him something, but I had nothing, no small bills, no candy, nothing. Finally, I opened up the Astronomy magazine I was reading and showed him the star chart in the middle. I tried to explain what it was, and I'm not sure he really got it, but when I asked him if he understood, he said, "Yes, stars, in the sky at night." I asked him if he wanted the star chart, and he said yes, so I tore it out of my magazine. It's difficult to learn to use a star chart on your own, but I like to think of him outside sitting outside his hut after dark, comparing the sky with the chart. I hope eventually he deciphers the puzzle and carries it with him the rest of his life.

Uninspired.

I stayed up too late last night, counseling friends through various personal and academic crises. In the end, I don't think I helped anyone, and I woke up groggy and cranky this morning, so I probably should have stopped trying to be suppportive about two hours before I made the decision to knock it off.

The only exciting news for the week is that I saw a tree full of Yellow-Footed Green Pigeons when I was in Defence Colony on Monday. They are kind of awesome, but probably not worth an entire blog post.

Other Random Concerns.

• When I came home after a weekend away, my room had been thoroughly dusted. I often leave my books in stacks on top of the shelves or on my desk, but apparently the maid doesn't like this arrangement. This weekend, she stood the three books that wouldn't fit on my literature shelf upside down and on end, on the top shelf, pretty much out of my reach.
• It is really frustrating that I can't read Panjabi. When I am reading it alongside the Hindi and Urdu on the signs in Delhi, it makes perfect sense. However, once the companion Hindi is removed, it all turns into Greek (except I could probably figure out more of the Greek than I can of Panjabi). If I ever get lost in the Panjab, I'm screwed.
• How much do you suppose I'd need to pay for a hotel room in Delhi with an American bed? My back is killing me after this weekend. I thought I had become accustomed to my bed here in Delhi, but it isn't helping my lower back pain right now.
• You know that Vodafone commercial were the guy buys a diamond ring, and when he leaves the shop, the entire city is staring at him? The point of the commercial is that with Vodafone's very reasonable price of 10 paise per SMS, you can spread gossip efficiently and inexpensively. So, by the time the guy gets to the restaurant with his ring, his soon-to-be-affianced knows exactly what's up. Well, my point is this: this commercial shows EXACTLY what it is like for a foreigner in a town where many foreigners don't go. Staring, gaping, following, everybody knows exactly where you are, every second of the day.
• Slumdog Millionaire. Eh...not so much. Parts of it were brilliant (the organized begging, the spurious mineral water, the empty hotel/development project, the unfinished building in Mumbai, the pathways through the basti). Most of it, however, was just a filmi remake of Salaam Bombay. Such a shame, the movie started out so well, and then just dissolved into a story about how we don't have to worry about the fate of the poor chaiwallah because he was pure of heart and very resilient, and therefore would turn out A-OK. No need to examine our own roles in creating the slums and allowing organized crime and oppression to thrive.
• I'm thinking about abandoning my Urdu lessons. For one thing, they are expensive, and I feel like a walking bank machine these days. For another thing, my head is too tired to add another language right now. I know it's mostly just learning the script, and in theory, it will help me with my Hindi, but it feels like too much for me these days. I'm not here to become fluent in Hindi, anyway, the time for that has past. My Hindi is good enough for daily life, and right now I need to create some more space in my cotton-filled head for thinking about my real work.
• Speaking of real work, today I found something that will help me not at all with my dissertation, but could form the basis of a later article on the restoration of the Jaipur observatory in 1901. It's funny the things I'm learning about India without even trying, just looking at catalogue indices. Do you want to know what's really irritating, though? The indices for 1850-1859 Foreign Department (R-Z) are completely missing, as are the 1903 Foreign Department indices. How can I do research without an index? It boggles.

Ugh.

Head cold. Cry for me.

Firefox *$&*!!!!!!

I updated Firefox the other day, and it completely broke my machine. Not only can I not access the web with Firefox, I can't use Opera, either. And I couldn't even get Chrome to install as a third alternative. IE still works, but as we know, IE is hosed. WTF? It can't be my firewall, because even when it is completely disabled, Firefox and Opera don't work. Everything worked perfectly fine before this stupid update, I've followed all the suggested fixes, uninstalled/reinstall Firefox, uninstalled/reinstalled Opera, turned off and on all my security settings in various configurations, and nothing works. Do you know how hard it is going to be to get someone to fix this in Delhi? Goddamn you, Firefox.

Babel.

I can't tell if it's sign that I'm living my life right, or that I'm living my life wrong, but this afternoon, in order to listen to an announcement on the train, I had to lift my eyes from a page of Russian text* and turn down my Hindi music** so I could focus on the spoken French.

I've been thinking about foreign languages a lot lately, partly because London, as a post-imperialist city, is packed full of people speaking everything but English. In fact, I have not heard so much Russian spoken around me since I was last in Moscow. In Haringey, I hear a lot of Panjabi, Hindi, Urdu, etc. The other day, I was in an off-license buying chocolate, and a guy came in to buy something out of the cooler section. The cashier kept yelling at him, but clearly the customer had no idea what was being said. The customer eventually just shrugged and walked back out without buying anything. When I got up to the counter, the cashier complained to me that he didn't know why the guy didn't understand, since he was yelling, "Milk!" in Gujarati. Is everyone in London expected to speak Gujarati? This morning, when I got on the tube, there was a Turkish newspaper abandoned on the seat across from me. Four stops later, a man got on, sat down, turned on his i-pod, picked up the paper, and started reading it, just as if he'd expected to find a Turkish newspaper waiting for his arrival.

So, there's that, but mostly I've been thinking about the relationship between foreign languages and research--shouldn't there be a limit to how many languages a person should have to know to do dissertation research? Right now my MS Word spell check is set up for English (United States), English (United Kingdom), French (Paris), Persian, German (Germany), Portuguese (Portugal), Hindi (India), and Russian (Russia). Also Arabic (Algeria), but that's just for a few astronomy words, not something I've really used in the past two months. The rest of it, though, is completely real--all languages in which I've read or transcribed manuscripts over the past eight weeks. It's starting to feel like a bit much--I know I'm supposed to be all postcolonial and into the local and everything, but I'm starting to wonder why I don't rely on the Persian/French/German manuscripts that have already been translated to English, instead of finding new manuscripts, or double-checking old translations? I just read a perfectly decent book that relied heavily on the English versions of Tavernier and Bernier, for instance--was there any need for me to read it in French?

Probably not. When I was doing post-bacc. work in Art History, one of the assignments in the Modern-Contemporary Survey Course was an annotated bibliograpy. Each student was assigned a female artist whose work was exhibited in the Paris Salon (1907? 1917? can't remember), and we had to produce all the sources we could think of to research that artist's biography. The artist didn't have to actually show up in any of the sources; rather, the sources just had to be real possibilities for information (checking the Thieme-Becker for an artist showing at the Paris Salon of 1910-ish would have been a good idea, for instance, even if the artist didn't actually appear in it). Anyway, I put down the standard list of sources, but I also put down a bunch of Russian bio catalogues, because they were from the right time period, and they included information on the Salon exhibitions. Instead of giving my paper back in class, the professor asked me to come to his office to retrieve my assignment. Why? He wanted to ask me why I put down all those Russian sources in my bibliography. I said they were relevant, and in fact, my artist appeared in one of them. His response? "I don't think you put them there because they're relevant, I think you put them there to show off." No one else in the class had used any foreign language resources (except the Thieme-Becker and the Benezit, obviously), so of course, I was showing off.

Well, okay, that's a very wordy and round about way to say that it feels like I really am just showing off at this point. Who the hell cares if I'm translating the road book from the Chahar Gulshan myself? I mean, really? Does it really matter if I just use Tod's history of Rajastan for clan lineages instead of struggling through the #*^&&!!!! Jaipuri myself? I think no one would notice or care if I used the Ball or Phillips translation of Tavernier, instead of citing the original French. Ditto for Tieffenthaler (although in that case...hm. The original was in German, and the translation I'm using is in French, so...not English). I would be getting a lot more work done if I just stuck to the English archive, that's for sure. I'm not quite sure what I'm up to here, but I'm definitely tired of thinking in foreign languages--not a good sign when I'm a) on day 1 of a 14 day stay in Paris; and b) looking ahead to a 9-month stay in India.

Revisiting my opening statement, I think it might be the second choice--if the nightmares you've been having about being trapped outside during aerial bombing attacks on London are in multiple languages, that's probably a sign you're doing something wrong.

*I'm reading Pikovaya Dama again because a note in the edition of Crime and Punishment that I've been reading this week [in English!] says it was a direct inspiration for Dostoevsky's story

**I seriously need to expand my collection of Bollywood music, the last new soundtrack I purchased was Jhoom Barabar Jhoom.

Poor Customer Service.

You know what? Classmates.com really sucks. Any service that relies on auto-renewal, without informing its customers that the renewal date is approaching, is sketchy. It's making money because customers are absent-minded (me) or busy (me again), not because customers are satisfied and sign up for another year by choice. Yeah, well, maybe you can get my money once because I didn't keep on top of things, but you'll never get it again.

ETA: Aha--someone else has had it with classmates.com. Imagine how angry he would be if that $15 subscription turned into a $40 subscription over night.

Still Alive.

Saw the French & Saunders Still Alive show this evening, and it put me in a slightly better frame of mind. Actually, I was a bit teary at the end (before the encore bit with the wall), but so was the man sitting next to me, so I guess that's okay. They wore the funny pants through most of the show, making funny things even more funnier. Still, it's sometimes amazing the thin line between horribly funny and horribly painful. I think the boarding school skit must have really hit some people hard, because I heard a lot of stifled moans at its conclusion, as if everyone thought it was funny, but then couldn't laugh because they'd suddenly realized that it could have been them left at school for the holidays. Ditto for the sketch with Saunders as the whacked out, emotionally fragile, Glastonbury-esque mom and French as the smart, overweight daughte who could never be sure her mother loved her because she was fat. It was funny, but I know many women were watching the interaction thinking, "That's what my mom said when she wanted me to lose weight!"

Speaking of weight, there's a photo in the program/brochure of Dawn French, looking quite young. The woman next to me said, "Oh, she's so young! And thin!" And I replied, "But you know, I bet she didn't realize she was thin." And the woman nodded and said, "We were just talking about that, how we thought we were so huge when we were young, but now we look back, and think, oh, if only I could be that skinny." "Yeah," I said. "I was tiny when I was in college, and all I could think about was how fat I was. It's amazing, isn't it. We all start out behind, thinking the worst of ourselves, don't we?"

And then we enjoyed two women taking the stage, and holding it as their own, and that was the best thing that could have happened after such a conversation.

Thank god for globalisation.

Otherwise, I would have been forced to spend 20+ quid on a hair cut at a shop in the high street of Cockfosters. Thanks to aggressive capitalist markets, I instead spent only 12GBP for a trim at the Supercuts in Shopping City at Wood Green.

Actually, that's not true. I spent 15GBP--I gave the hairdresser a 25% tip. Part of my generosity was due to the fact that she took on the challenge that is my head 20 minutes before closing time. Most of my generosity, though, was because she was nice to me, and talked to me while she was working. Well, yes, hairdressers often try and chat with me (ask Catherine about the woman who sometimes cuts hair but mostly just talks in the shop out at Whitehall), but I tend not to engage in small talk. It's often the end of the day--or the beginning of the day--and I'm tired, and not really in the mood to chat. I'm polite and all, but not really talkative. Usually. I don't know what happened yesterday, but I had a real, honest to god conversation sitting in that tippy chair.

We went through all the usual questions--do you ever color your hair, why are you in London, do you have any children--and then got onto the topic of Skype, and how it was saving my marriage. She also uses Skype, but said she gave up using it with her mother, because her mother always cried at the end, and because she was a "big wuzzy", she also ended up in tears. It was easier to say goodbye on the phone than on a webcam. Somehow we moved on from there to a discussion about aging parents, and I admitted that was one of the worst parts of being away for a year, the worry that I might not see my parents again.

She told me that her father had died three years ago or so, and talked about how hard that first year was--hard for her, but also hard because she had to step up when her mother fell to pieces. She told me that it was something for which you tried to prepare, but until it happened, you just didn't quite understand what it was like. The father of a friend had died a bit before hers had, and she tried to be supportive, but it wasn't until her own father died that she realized just how much she didn't understand what her friend had been going through. The first year was the hardest, but then she was able to move on--it got easier with time. Still hard, but better.

I don't know, she was remarkably upbeat about the whole thing. Serious, but also looking out for the points where a positive turn could be taken--didn't I have siblings that could help, wasn't it good that my father had a course of treatment that kept him here this long, etc. It was the first real conversation I've had in weeks, and I don't think I'll ever forget her telling me about her parents, and how they loved each other, right up to the end, even after 45 years of marriage. "My father was a good man," she told me. I could tell she meant it, she was telling the truth, and it was really kind of her to share that moment with me.

Pissed, and not in the good, drunken sense.

I know it doesn't make any sort of sense, but sometimes I get REALLY ANGRY when people mistake me for a man. Or, I guess it's not the mistaking part of it, it's the "is that a girl or guy?" conversation that happens when I am obviously in earshot. I know I've ranted about this before, but bear with me, because it just ruined my day again.

Yes, as I've noted before, sometimes I think it's funny. Case in point: my first day here in the UK, I went to Carphone Warehouse on the shopping parade and bought mobile phone and a world SIM card. Throughout the entire transaction, the clerk called me "Sir," even after I gave him my credit card (only Johnny Cash knows a boy named Sue, surely). And I thought that was pretty funny, because he just never really clued in, despite the fact that when I walk, I lead with one bodacious bosom.

Tonight, though, it just pissed me off. I was on the train home after a decent afternoon at the movies (How to Lose Friends, if you're interested), and I was in the last car on the train with a small group traveling together. Americans, seemingly from three different families, going out to Cockfosters for god knows what reason. Three CUTE little boys that made me laugh with their stated intentions of having 600 kids. So, I was getting off the train, thinking"that was a nice way to end the day, listening to American accents is so effortless compared to what I do most of the day" (one of the adults actually said "Look at this bad boy!" when showing his mate a picture of the largest catfish in Europe, such an American thing to say), and then they had to ruin it.

When we got off the train, just them and me from the last car, I wasn't even 3 feet away from before the catfish guy turned to his friend and said, "Was that a guy or a girl?" and his friend answered, "Yeah, I know, I had to look twice before I could figure it out." Okay, I'm wearing casual clothes today, apparently women in the UK aren't ever allowed to wear plaid shirts, jeans and tennis shoes, but jesus christ, couldn't you just let me get a little farther away before you start talking about me? I'm just saying. No, I'm just saying thanks for nothing, losers with American accents. I hope they are your dead bodies inside that outsize, European catfish.

Sidewalks.

I wonder if there's a limit to the number of people you can get to know in a lifetime. If there's a limit to the amount of energy a person can expend exchanging and absorbing life stories. Perhaps if you share too much too often as a young person, you run yourself short on possibilities for new friendships later on in life. You can't keep hold of all those people you knew when you were ten or twenty or thirty, even though they represent a major investment of time and energy and intimacy of sorts. But it's difficult to replace them when you're young, and it's even more difficult when you're older. If you only have it in you to really, truly know twenty people in your lifetime, and you've met and parted with eighteen of those people before your fortieth birthday, you've only got two people left to draw newly close to you in the second half of your life. It's too bad you didn't realize until too late that you should have used your choices more carefully when you had the chance ten years ago.

Doing new things.

I finished up at the British Library a bit early today, so I went to see a movie. I know, Catherine must be picking her jaw up off the floor: I willingly went to the cinema, and guess what--I saw a serious film: Il y a longtemps que je t'aime. I knew nothing about it except that it had Kirstin Scott Thomas in it. I generally avoid movies with her in it, even though I think she's stunning. She reminds me of Eileen, who then reminds me of Todd--perhaps because we saw Angels and Insects with them? I'm not sure. Anyway, Scott Thomas should be proud of her work, as should Elsa Zylberstein. I'm not going to say anything about the movie, other than it was beautiful, but painful. The one editorial I would write about it would give away the last scene, so I'll keep my opinions to myself.

This movie also briefly reminded me of Debbie, because in one scene was shown a poster for Les Jeux Dangereux, which reminded me of the poster for Jeux interdits I had on my wall my freshman year of college at WWU. My first French film, and I wouldn't have seen it if Debbie hadn't taken me to the PAC with her.

In other news, I am eating too much pizza, but at least I'm working hard to get it. I can hardly wait to get to India where I can eat with my fingers like a civilized person. God, silverware sucks.

Conspiracy Theory.

"Everyone knew that Kathleen was pregnant and that she died of the child. You'd have to be an idiot not to have figured that out, what with the girl's hasty home-coming and incarceration in the house. But the thing you do in a case like that is to go along with the idea that the child is the offspring of the grandparents. Everyone agrees to this fiction, and the only people who'd breathe a word of the actual facts to the illegitimate child are those who are so malicious to begin with that they are easily dismissed as liars. As in truth they are. For the beneficent lie tells the truth about the child, which is "you belong in this community", whereas the malicious truth-tellers use fact to convey a lie, which is "you don't belong". This is an imperfect system but it's the prevailing one. As as the years go by the facts get eroded and scattered by time, until there are more people who don't know than people who do."

Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall On Your Knees (London: Vintage Books, 1997): 165-6.

Freak.

Sometimes the intensity of my anxiety surprises even me. For instance, did you know that for the past ten years, I have been worried that something was going to happen to the Standard of Ur and its companion pieces, The Ram in a Thicket and the Queen's (Golden) Lyre of Ur? I know this fear is crazy--what possible difference could it make in my life if the Standard of Ur somehow was destroyed? But I ran over the to British Museum today just to make sure they were there. At first I was completely disoriented by the renovations made since the removal of the British Library to its own site (the British Museum now seems more like an over-sized gift shop than a museum, I think). Once oriented, however, I went straight to the Mesopotamia rooms to make sure the Standard and friends were okay. Even as I got closer, my anxiety grew more acute. At two galleries away, I was panicked that they were gone. At one gallery away, I had sweated completely through my shirt and jacket. At ten paces, I had to fight back tears of relief that everything was in place and as it should be.

For anyone else suffering from this particular anxiety, there is a small women's restroom just outside the north lift where you can recover from yourself in privacy.

Even a monkey can do it.

Anyone who has the (dis)pleasure of dining with me knows I am completely incapable of using cutlery. My wife teases me about the way I hold my fork, and my parents used to argue about the same when I was a kid (whose responsibility was it to teach me to hold a knife and fork properly, anyway?). So, here I am in, in a land where everyone eats pizza with utensils instead of fingers, suffering and sweating every lunch hour. As I slowly work my way through the menu at Pizza Express, I am being forced to eat my entire lunch, day after day, with fork and knife.

This week I discovered that the angle at which you hold your knife when cutting actually makes a difference. It's much more effective to saw a pizza crust at a 23-degree rather than a 45-degree angle. Who knew? Well, probably everyone who knows how to use silverware knew this. However, until recently, that group did not include me. I'm sure whatever gains I make will be lost after nine months of eating with my right hand only in India, but in the meantime, I'm making progress with my tools.

Parting Gifts.

The best going-away gift I received last week was handed to me quite casually by my therapist. As we were wrapping up my final session, she looked down at her notes and agreed with me that I would be just fine this coming year. "You're meeting your potential, and you are going to do well." As you might remember, living up to my "potential" has always been a big burden for me. I never seem to be able to do it, I always seem to be chasing my potential and just falling short. But, finally, someone has decided that I'm doing enough, I'm maxing out my capabilities, and I should feel good about that.

The worst going-away present I received last week was a parking ticket. I was on my way back to my car with 20 minutes to spare on my meter when a faculty member stopped me to talk to me about her research plans. I kept trying to edge toward the door, but I couldn't bring myself to say, "Hey, my parking meter is about to run out of money, I gotta go!" My meter was 5 minutes expired when I got back to my car, and I had a $20 ticket because of it. It's just annoying, because I am so uptight about putting money in my meter, parking legally, and being responsible, and then, look what happens on my very last day on campus.

Just Add Ice

I'm rapidly approaching hockey camp levels of physical exhaustion. I've been wondering: am I sick? Am I old? Am I just a wuss? But last night I was looking at the calendar, and I realized that in month of July, I have driven from Bloomington (IN) to Rantoul (IL) and back five times, plus driven to Columbus (OH) and back, as well as to Corinth (MS) and back. For those of you keeping track, that's a minimum of 3190 miles in 31 days.

Those drives were interrupted by some heavy-duty moving chores. Thank god for strong men, as at least we had help loading and unloading the moving truck. I packed every box in our two-bedroom townhouse, though, and unpacked them at the other end (must get rid of some books before relocating again). Catherine was able to take a Saturday to help with the move-out cleaning. She did most of the kitchen, so that was nice.

Also in my month was a full day at the zoo, and a day of wandering Civil War battlefields. Plus, our house in Bloomington was full of strange men much of this month--the contractors finally got around to finishing the screen porch and painting the dining room. Oh, and putting up a desperately-needed 140' fence between us and the neighbors. Thank god I didn't have to dig the post holes for that! But it's super stressful to me to have strangers in my house, particularly when they are men. Men are loud and take up a lot of room.

I was supposed to wash down the furniture so we could put it back on the newly finished porch this afternoon, but I couldn't summon the energy. I'm going to finish this post, make some popcorn, and then hit the couch to watch the Brickyard for the rest of the afternoon. That's all I can do, and believe me, I'm really doing the best that I can do right now.

Shot hoops for about an hour today, then spent the balance of the afternoon reading Katie Hnida's Still Kicking: My Dramatic Journey As the First Woman to Play Division One College Football. I haven't read many sports books since going back to grad school, and this will probably be it for the year. It only took a couple of hours to read, but I think the content will linger with me for awhile. I know a lot of people questioned both her kicking ability and her honesty when left Colorado, but I have to say--Katie's story rings true for me. I suspect any girl/woman who has ever played on a boys'/mens' sports team will recognize at least part of her experience.

Playing on a boys' team in junior high was embarrassing (I'll never forgive the coach for making a big deal out of the chest block drill); playing on a boys' team in high school was mostly humiliating (crying in front of my teammates when I blew out the ligaments in my right ankle isn't one of my favorite memories); and playing in a mens' league my first two years of colleage was traumatic (even before one of my teammates knocked me out cold with a soccer ball, my first concussion). In theory, there were two other women on the team, but they were apparently smarter than I was and left well before season's end. I don't know...I remember being struck mute from finding mens' hands in inappropriate places, being called inappropriate names, being constantly derided or patronized. I was literally unable to open my mouth when Anka asked me what was wrong after practice. I stopped talking to her completely, because how could I tell her about the things my teammates were saying and doing? God, I hated that team and everyone on it.

Anyway, how much worse was Katie's story? If I still feel like vomiting twenty years after relatively mild harassment, what must she be going through? I think my own blog is a testament to the power of sport to drive a person to do incredibly stupid and dumb things--play even when concussed, play with a broken bone, play even though you know you're moving one step closer to permanent disability. So, I understand what kept her coming back to game. I was willing to sacrifice my mental and physical health for recreational sports; imagine if I'd had real talent, if I had been good enough at anything to play Div I. Well, Katie Hnida's stronger than I ever was--I stopped playing soccer by my twentieth birthday, and she kept working to make football happen, even after being raped by a teammate. I'm just sad that she had to work so hard, and that Div I football protects its abusive behaviors so well. Hasn't anyone in athletics learned anything since I was a freshman 20+ years ago? Apparently not.

Yesterday, we went for a hike out at Cedar Bluffs (if you follow that link--look at the rather radical topography). Once upon a time (before we knew the Nature Conservancy rules, I swear), we were strong and agile enough to climb straight up the bluff. Hard to believe, but it's true. Our first trip to the bluffs was spurred by our desire to find the Corbeau letterbox (in its original location). We've been back a couple of times just because. Yesterday, we took the trail around the foot of the bluff, and that was challenging enough. A lot of scrambling over slippery rocks--a stupid thing to do the week before you're scheduled to leave for India, I'd say. Still, it was fun, even though I spent 3/4 of the time saying "You remember when I wasn't such a wuss?" We saw a baby Copperhead snake taking in the sun on one of the rocks.