success/fail

This past week has been so weird, such a combination of successes and failures and bizarre emotional reactions that to even begin to chart them in a characteristically lengthy way would be too much for my brain. Also, wondering why this is double-spaced--whatever. Just give me tea.

SUCCESS: I climbed a mountain. Sort of. I was in Colorado, obviously, and though I think any Coloradoan would laugh at that statement in its context (11,000 feet is maybe a mountain, but a little one, and not exactly one involving climbing equipment [except ski poles, in my case]), but a Midwesterner, a Midwesterner would understand. Actually it was maybe the most physically demanding thing I've ever done--the other contender is this 30-mile hilly bike ride when I was 12 or 13. That was rough. Also, I anticipate childbirth won't be a walk in the park. But I have time to do more painful things to my body before then, like hike up a 12,000 foot mountain.

FAIL: I barely climbed a mountain. It got pretty bad. The last half mile or so, other people had to carry my things. Then the combination of altitude and pain and sun and whatever just left me with a headache and wanting to vomit and not eat anything and feeling weak and genuinely lame. I can't feel terrible about myself because of this one, seeing as altitude sickness is not really something you can help, but 11,000 feet is pretty wimpy. It also somewhat amounts to me needing to be more physically active. I wish I still had my bike. Oh well--GOAL.

FAIL: Hanging out with my sister's friends, it became obvious to me--painfully obvious--that I. Am. So. Ignorant. Now, that used to not bother me so much. The conversation inevitably turned to something I don't understand (calculus, engineering, physics) and I sort of paid attention and sort of zoned out and mostly didn't care because I was not a _____ Person. But for some reason... this time, it depressed me to no end. Because I don't want to not be a Math Person; I don't want to be an English Person or whatever the hell I'd be referred to as.. I just want to be an intelligent person who can participate in the conversation. I don't like feeling so polarized. So anyway, after sitting in a hot tub and drinking coconut rum and listening to a conversation about engineering and physics that I did not even marginally understand, I felt for the first time a sort of aversion to the "theoretical" basis of the teaching at this university, and the way "practical" seems like a dirty word. Practical means useful. There's nothing bad about that. I started thinking that maybe I'm not learning much of anything, maybe I'm cheating at education. I know things about water management and the AIDS crisis and oil scarcity, but all you need to learn about that is an ability to read. In fact, it could all be learned in my free time. WHY AM I NOT DEVOTING MY LIFE TO CHEMISTRY AND CALCULUS? I like talking about social ideas, but scientific ideas are just another kind of philosophy--just more complicated. And it's not uninteresting. I just need.. a good book. To teach me. Or a very patient person. Or something.

FAIL: No CLS Scholarship for summer Jaipur study. Odds were bad (500/4,000) but still. And I don't want to spend my summer begging people for money. More on that later.

SUCCESS...? So, while all of these Fails were mixing in my head on two airplanes and in some stupid Witchita airport and then on the dysfunctional CTA and I really just felt a lot like crying because it's been a weird, mood-swingy day or two, and I was feeling completely disinterested in humanity, I happened to sit down next to this guy on the bus who pressed a little paper toward me with Clark/Lake written on it and implored me to help him figure out how to get there. He was confused since the Blue Line randomly stopped and shoved us off the train and onto a bus and he didn't really understand how he'd get to the stop. So I helped him. I told him to follow me and asked him about himself and he told me he was from India (which was already obvious because of the accent) but I couldn't help but be completely charmed by his unassuming code of dress--front-facing, unbroken-in baseball cap; tucked-in shirt--and the little smile he had while telling me all of these things about India I already knew. He was particularly eager to talk about Buddhism and Hinduism and how he's not religious and why. At the stop, he gave me his business card and told me to call him when I'm in India. It was all just very strange, but at the same time the experience seemed to be winking at me--it was like the final fulfillment of that otherworldly night following chum-chums in Devon. I'd met a stranger. I'd made, though superficially, a connection in the city.

last summer was nice.

get lost.

Why is LOST so amazing?

Here's why:

1. It encompasses the best elements for a modern epic: tensions between science and faith; the birth of a society and evolution of positions within it (and factions); constant, shifting questions of trust; intense character development; multiple plot-lines; constant evocation of the past; danger; outside characters with vague motives; mythology and mystery.

2. The archetypes are so interesting. The Leader, the Con Man, (not to be confused with the Outlaw), the Man of Faith, the Young Mother, the Foreign Couple (with Gender-Equality-Issues), the Creepy Guy You Can't Trust, the Soldier, the Lover.

Interesting because each one's past informs who they are on the island. And you learn their past directly, by seeing it.

3. Desmond. I just like Desmond. It's A's influence, maybe.

---

If you don't see it from the beginning, it isn't worth it. If you do see it from the beginning, it's sort of endlessly fascinating. Admittedly, Season 3 mostly sucked.

So, I don't actually watch any other TV. But Lost is good because of the story factor. It's a story. I sometimes spend time just thinking of how satisfying it is as a story. It's kind of like the Twilight Zone, only modern and way more complicated.

It's the mystery factor--so few stories are mysteries anymore, and mysteries, I think, speak to people more deeply than America's Next Top Model. Because at the end of the episode, you still don't know what's going on but you're a little bit closer to finding out. Sort of like how at the end of the day, you're still not sure why you're alive but some more interesting things might have happened to pull you in a direction.

Except it's bigger than that, because you know the mystery in the story is overarchingly significant, and cosmic, and profoundly life-altering. And we will find out.

Most likely we won't find out why we exist, though. Or what's beyond the beyondest thing we know. Or what's the last beyond.

Did that make sense, without sounding incredibly prosaic?

No? Well, give me a break. I'm talking about a television show, here.

bureaucracy.

Today was horribly bureaucratic.

Here are the things I got accomplished:

1. I got taken/printed out passport photos.
2. I sent in my Jaipur confirmation materials, sans $400 deposit.
3. I deposited my check.
4. I picked up/paid for my contacts. (These last two hardly seem like "accomplishments", until you realize how unwilling I am to run boring, essential errands.)
5. I bought two books--"The Bloodless Revolution" (vegetarianism philosophy/history book [with pretty cover!] to help with ENST final [12-15page?!] paper), and Beginner's Urdu Script, because my Hindi prof believes that learning the Urdu script is essential to knowing Hindi, and damned if I'm starting next quarter without an intro.
6. I called AT&T about how our DSL is suck-city and can never connect (how dare you suggest I'm stealing someone's internet right now..), and scheduled a guy to come in and fix life.
7. I got to the West Side, I ate in a fine, stuck-up vegetarian restaurant, I came home.
8. I finished my IS project circa 12:30AM in the Reg.

Here are the reasons I wanted to gauge out my eyes repeatedly:

1. CVS is low on the cool factor and took an hour to get my passport/personal-for-family photos processed and printed. This put a dent in my errand-run and I ended up going to campus, then back, to look at/buy some books.
2. After I had the pictures my phone died and since I had a dinnerrr arrangement I had to come back to the apartment to charge the phone, and also get all my confirmation stuff around, and then I had to go back to campus to the REG--to get random information and then blah blah blah boring stuff involving emailing study abroad people about all my conflicting program/funding/deposit issues.
3. I laid down a staggering ONE HUNDRED FIFTY FIVE DOLLARS for like TWO MONTHS WORTH of contacts. WHAT?! That's more than the frigging check I deposited, which I was oh-so-reassured by. I now have to wait until next Friday to have like, ANY money at ALL. I mean, I know I have special oxygen requirements or whatever, but this is just frigging ridiculous. Think of the books I could buy! The impoverished families I could feed! My own impoverished mouth I could feed! All this I forgo for some floppy little eye adhesives? LAME.
4. The AT&T conversation was easily about two years long. Listen--I don't need to talk to 4 different people to hear the same thing 4 different times. If I wanted another opinion, I'd go to a bad doctor and then go to a good doctor. I just want some DSL, so I can check my email once in a while and see if study abroad people/scholarship people have gotten back to me, or if a prof has suddenly assigned something I have no time for. That's all, kindly AT&T folk. Send a man with a toolbox, and we're done here.
5. I accidentally broke a pane of glass in my door out to the front balcony. Seriously. This is no time to get all Popeye on the apartment; that'll probably be coming out of the $2 left in my bank account.
6. Someone I know got frigging jumped, increasing the number of people I personally know who've been attacked in Hyde Park to an uncomfortable figure. Which is desperately frustrating in a way that requires a much longer, separate post to even begin to touch on.
7. Dinner was surprisingly circa $~90, and was paid for by my friend's boyfriend whom I just met today. And none of us were satisfied with it.

Zen.
Zen.
Zen.

In other news, happier news, I got into the University of Chicago PUNE program. Which means..

(drum roll, please........)

I am going to India this fall, no matter what.

I want 2283957 times more to go on the year-long Jaipur, but regardless, I am getting out of here. Thank sweet Jesus on high.

1:55AM = sleep now? OK.

human; nature

Yesterday I ate remarkably delicious Ethiopian food. I started reading--for fun--The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollen. I started getting around my confirmation materials for Jaipur.

I also had two very different, very strange experiences. Involving animals.

Subject A: Baby chicks at the MSI.

My dad had wanted to go to the Museum of Science and Industry. I agreed, even though I find it a bit creepy and hysterically pro-capitalism (the oil and coal exhibits are entirely uncritical, for example, showing kids how the fossil fuels can be "fun"). The miniature Chicago-Seattle train set-up was cool. The WWII German U-boat seemed really interesting, but the tickets for it were sold out.

And then there was the Genetics exhibit. It was fine, mostly. There were lots of interactive displays ("What animal fetus is this? Turn the wheel to find out!") and a little film on the Human Genome Project. Because the museum (as most museums are) was targeted mainly at kids, they also found some reason to put a couple incubators in the Genetics room. The first had several eggs that were starting to hatch; the second featured a dozen or more baby chicks, running around and bumping into each other. Both incubators were surrounded by children and their parents, gasping at the cracking shells and cooing at the clumsy baby chicks. I took a picture on my phone and started thinking about how weird it was... these animals are born to delighted human faces, no mother in sight, and then they run around a tiny octagonal room while people tap on the glass. Signs hung on the walls, explaining how eggs are fertilized, explaining the stages of development. I took a picture on my phone.

And I wondered--How separated from animals are we?

Later that night, I showed A. the picture. She nodded. "Ooh, yeah, the chicks. Did you know they kill them? Yeah, I know someone who worked at the MSI over the summer. Apparently, every Tuesday they come in and remove the baby chicks, and they have nothing to do with them. So they kill them."

?!

Subject B: Grizzly Man

I'd been looking forward to seeing this ever since my sister told me about it a year ago. Telling me about it, she looked really pinched and uncomfortable. She described it as disturbing.

For anyone who doesn't know, Grizzly Man is a documentary about Timothy Treadwell, a man who spent 13 consecutive summers in the Alaskan wilderness filming grizzly bears. But he doesn't study them. He simply loves them, in really the most passionate sense of the word. He gets dangerously close, names them and speaks softly to them. He isn't eccentric, in the Steve Irwin nature-man sense. Rather, he seems legitimately mentally ill--possibly bipolar. The disturbing part is the fact that the 13th summer, he gets too close and is mauled to death and then eaten by a starving bear. And his girlfriend goes with him. And it's caught on tape. And described.

Actually, this alone isn't the most disturbing aspect. Everything works together. You hear about his descent into alcoholism and the reinvention of his identity afterward.. his discovery of the beauty of nature causing him to give up alcohol. You see his tension with civilization as he curses wildly, lividly, everyone from the government to the park service for their wrongful treatment of the grizzlies. You see him tenderly stroking the foxes, whispering "I love you, I love you, I love you."

In the end, the documentary wasn't really about Treadwell. It was more about--as filmmaker Herzog describes--"cold indifference". Treadwell seemed to lose contact with his own humanity, seemed to want to be a bear (as many of those interviewed pointed out). The portrayal of Treadwell was sympathetic, but the real message seemed to be the brutal reality of nature.

(I recommend the documentary, by the way. It's hard to really understand unless you watch him.)

Chicks as objects, bears as family. Destroyed chicks, destroyed human.

Which really just hits home the phrase, "the cold indifference of nature."

Regardless, an angry email to the MSI is in order.

frigid-air

Apparently, by the book of MAC Property Management, there's an all-or-nothing policy when it comes to heat. Which is to say, either it's 900 degrees in here and we're all sweating and basically in our underwear and opening all the windows in the middle of the Chicago winter, or they turn the heat off entirely. It was circa 50 degrees the other day (which was AMAZING, my joy was paralleled only by that of the little bird that washed itself in the little puddle on an ice sheet on someone's lawn and the squirrel that made eye contact with me) and so, rightly, our heat was turned off. But they haven't turned it on since, and this is CHICAGO, people, which means it's back in the 20-degree range again, at least for a while. So we've closed all our windows and bundled in blankets and I took a ridiculously hot bath tonight and even drank some of the coffee T. made with soy milk. Which might explain why I'm serenely writing a very detailed post at 1AM in the middle of yet another overwhelmingly demanding week.

On Soy Milk:

So I've recently been really disturbed by milk. And eggs. And, well, I've been having vegan tendencies. It's taken me a while to come out and admit that, because of my avid fear of "becoming" something just because I have friends who've gone the same route, but I've been very interested in the topic of food ethics lately (some 4/5ish months ago my vegetarian kick became less about the environment and more about animal ethics) and what I've read about the dairy industry makes it seem no friendlier than the meat industry, really. The difference between veganism and vegetarianism is HUGE though, in terms of demands. Vegetarians can still maintain a pretty spontaneous dietary lifestyle, but most vegans I've hung out with have a very difficult time eating out, etc. I'm sure you can live just as freely, it's just about effort, but I'm a bit worried about balancing the surrendering of dairy while simultaneously maintaining a healthy diet while simultaneously not smashing my head into walls over suddenly-assigned-papers and weekly tests and midterms coming out the ass.

I'm thinking about doing an experimental vegan week spring quarter, however.

But anyway, what I was talking about in the first place was SOY MILK, which I bought the other day and tried to be really optimistic about. I tried it on my Raisin Bran yesterday morning and it made me feel vaguely nauseous in a why-is-this-bizarre-watery-yellow-crap-in-my-mouth kind of way. Perhaps it gets some getting used to. But it's not bad in coffee.

On Hindi:

Finally today I've memorized the entirety of my lines during the Hindi skit. I can recall it all independent of my cue cards. That's not to say it doesn't come out choppy and strangely emphasized, much like the English equivalent of "I love grapefruit because... it's so.... unusually tasty... when.. eaten with...... sugar?" I also can't guarantee that the tenuous string tying my brain to the progression of words won't be severed upon the impact of 10-ish all-too-attentive faces. But seriously. I've got like 4 months of the language under my belt, how spectacular and Angelina Jolie-ish am I expected to be? I'll fall to my knees and weep tears of sweet satisfaction when I'm done with the whole mess at approximately 2:00pm Thursday.

On India:

My fantasies involving Jaipur have gotten a little too intense lately, likely due to the fact that finals week is quickly approaching. Among the unhealthy things I've done in relation to the fact that I might be in India next year:

1. Fantasize about writing a "Namaste, there!" letter to my host-stay Hindustani family. This would happen in late summer, and I would discuss where I go to college, my family members, and where I live (I also imagined drawing a US map and putting a star on MI to indicate where I grew up).
   
2. Google "Jaipuri woman".
   
3. Wonder about the Hindi word for "camel", so I can talk about how excited I am to see a camel.
4. Consider googling train rates so I can see how easily and cheaply I could get to the Himalayan foothills from Rajasthan.
   
5. Activate my University of Minnesota email address and think fondly of beautiful, wonderful Minnesota.
   

Stuff to remember (SELF): The NSEP is an intensely competitive scholarship, and this year there were a record number of applicants. Consider that your fate rests in the hands of probably some greasy DCers with stinking-bad cologne and hence you probably won't get funded, and hence CAN'T go to JAIPUR and must settle for CHICAGO which still has decent masala dosa in DEVON.

I'm going to Boulder soon (!!!) for spring break to see my sister and become physically active and maybe go camping and eat at the teal-and-pink and other-colored Dushanbe Teahouse and also eat Nepalese food and walk barefoot in streams and read books and write maybe, and look for a summer job?

ALSO: I might take a class on Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain" next quarter; read in conjunction with Nietzsche and other philosophers who informed his work. It sounds kind of ridiculously amazing, and also it fits into the IS "area and civilization studies" track and also I really feel the need to channel into my Germanness (Germanicness? Germanity?) and maybe this is how I can do it. I mean, I could have just as easily grown up speaking Deutsch. I should at least read a book from the fatherland.

This is totally what I'm going to think about during my skit, damn it.

and the god of redemption smiles upon me.

The University of Minnesota has deemed me worthy. I have been accepted into the year-long Minnesota Studies in International Development program in Jaipur. Now my hiatus hinges on funding, NSEP-style--I have to wait for at least another month.

Party tonight, was OK. I fulfilled my weekend socializing.

But who cares? Jaipur is 50% closer.