personal_mythos

First off, I graduated with honors in Feminist Studies. Whoo! I'm in consideration for all those types of honors (Magna Cum Laude, etc.) that depend on class standing, too. I got back my grades for the quarter, as well: A, A-, and B+, which is quite good, especially since I had senioritis and procrastinated rather more than I should have. I'm still looking for something for the fall, but I feel good about the one interview I had. I also need to start studying for the GRE, since I haven't taken a class that required any math skills whatsoever for a year and a half or so. I've heard that it's generally like the SAT though, so I'm not really worried.

In other news, I've started making bread. I had previously made pizza dough and sort of cinnamon-y buns (they were supposed to be pan dulce, but I fiddled with them) with pretty good results, but that's it for my previous yeasted bread experience. But for a potluck at the end of the quarter, I made vegan challah, and when my parents and grandparents came up for graduation weekend I made it again. Some people were astonished that it was vegan, and everyone who tried it liked it.

For the potluck. I wrapped a dish towel around it and stuck it in a paper bag, hugging it to my chest so it wouldn't be damaged, since I had another class beforehand. It was really hard not to just eat it!


The second one. Photo taken by my lovely mother. :)

Friday of graduation weekend I spoke at my department's 'senior celebration'. I presented a paper I had written for my senior seminar, entitled "Okinawa: health and militarization in historical context". Afterwards there was a carrot cake with marzipan slugs on top and slug trails made of jam (banana slugs are our mascot) and my advisor came to tell me and my family how well I'd done and that she thought I would make a great librarian, because of my dedication to in-depth research and my curiosity, picking different subjects for the final paper in each class. I was touched, and also surprised - I hadn't realized that most students write their papers on one or several themes rather than using them to explore new things.

That night I made the bread, and served it with a root vegetable bake and a kale-white bean dish. It was really filling, which surprised me a bit. I had the same experience with the tempeh tacos with spicy slaw I made tonight. This leads me to conclude that the ideal mix for a filling vegan or vegetarian dinner (both of these were vegan) is tons of veggies with a decent serving of protein, moderate amounts of starch, and some healthy fat. This is exciting, because one of my main problems as a vegan was that I felt hungry most of the time, perhaps due to not much veggies and too little good fat. If I can fill up this well on vegan stuff, I can reduce my dairy and egg consumption no problem (I have been doing so lately, especially since I decided I didn't want to buy milk so often after a bunch went bad).

I've been trying to think about the politics of textbooks, and why they usually feel so remedial. This stems in part from my membership in Wikibooks (a wiki textbook site run by the same foundation that runs Wikipedia). I'm considering working on the book about feminism, which is absolutely terrible right now. There is very little content, a lot of red links (removed or never created pages), no readily visible activity, and what little content there is is very textbook remedial (possibly because some of it came from Wikipedia) and fairly U.S. and Europe-centric. Bleurgh.

I'm really not sure if anyone would use even a more complete version of the book, and I like the idea of course readers as opposed to textbooks, because a reader always has a sense of being incomplete, and because readers mean you get into materials used by theorists and whatnot right away as an undergrad. Then again, a wiki is also never complete and it's somewhat egalitarian (depending on access to and comfort with technology). A wiki textbook, then, is odd - although I suppose traditional encyclopedias reflect similar institutional viewpoints and privilege to textbooks. I feel like a feminist textbook ought to look very different from most textbooks, and a wiki might be able to do it, but by definition, of course, I couldn't do it alone, and I'm afraid I'd have to.

My other problem is that though I've been on Wikipedia for a while, I've never felt up to writing an article about feminism - the only article I wrote from scratch was the one about Drakkar Entertainment, a German company that owns several record labels and does other services for bands as well (the current version is probably quite changed from that). That article was mostly an abbreviated form of the English version of the about page on their site. My most significant other contribution was to translate most of the NASA article from English to French a couple of years ago (before that the French version was only a short article corresponding mostly to the introduction from the English one). I've always felt nervous about writing a complete article, especially on a complex and contested subject like feminism. But I suppose I should be bold.

Anyone want to pitch in?



By the by, I ran into a classmate today, and we were talking about wikipedia for some reason. When I mentioned I had an account, she seemed surprised and asked if that meant I could edit it. I said that anyone could edit most articles, even without an account. She seemed impressed and asked if I had done so. This whole incident made me wonder if I'm unusually nerdy or tech-savvy, or if she was unusually the opposite, or a little of both. Hmmm.

I believe that reading should be enjoyable. Ditto language learning. In fact, an excess of unfun reading or language learning can kill motivation to do either one. And yet teachers often advise the (very unfun) use of dictionaries and laborious reading methods that are supposed to improve comprehension.

This bugs me, and not just for the reason I gave above. There are several other problems with this approach:
-looking up words is rarely helpful unless you understand the surrounding text quite well and have a vague idea of what the word means already (from having seen it before). Otherwise, not only will the definition not help you much to understand, but you won't remember it later.
-If you do it in a bilingual dictionary, it causes you to start translating, which impairs comprehension quite noticeably.
-it slows me down a lot. I want to get to the point.
-it makes me feel like I'm in class. This is stressful and makes me think in terms of numerical progress, though language learning does not work like that.

I think that for language learning, it's best to read things you enjoy in large quantities and as fast as is comfortable or as allows for acceptable (to you) comprehension. Only use the dictionary when you've seen a word repeatedly and it seems important but you're just not sure what it means (for nouns, an image search sometimes works better). I think this is the best way to become a better reader and writer in the language of your choice (and enjoy it, coming to like the language more).

I believe that Stephen Krashen has something on his site about how counterproductive teacher-imposed "reading strategies" often are. Khatz of AJATT of course writes a lot about the importance of enjoying the journey, but he's largely pro-dictionary.

Just a note - I'm not against dictionaries on the whole. I love looking up words and phrases that have been bugging me or to find out their origins. I think the way that words travel and change their meaning over the years is fascinating. For instance, "alley oop!" is from the French "allez hop!", and "entrée" is borrowed from French, but in French it means appetizer, not main dish.


EDIT: I forgot to add that eventually it's helpful to use monolingual dictionaries, in part because it teaches you how to define words, in part because you may need to know how to use them. I've also heard of people who learn to read and write in a language by working their way through a good monolingual dictionary.

This is the inside of the bus I took to campus this morning (perhaps I should say yesterday morning):

If you're not from the area, you may not initially see how this bus is weird. Local bus service is mostly provided by the one system, various school buses aside. There are several models of bus that run the local routes, and another couple that run the route through the mountains to the nearest big city, about a one-hour trip. These buses are distinct in that they are higher up, in order to accommodate baggage underneath. On the inside, the seats are more separate from one another, there are overhead baggage racks, and as you can see, the walkway in the center is weirdly lower than the rest of the floor (or the rest is weirdly higher). I find that this produces a more claustrophobic feeling than the regular buses since the ceiling feels lower, but at least you don't usually have someone's backpack in your face. Anyway, apparently they didn't have a regular bus available to run the route to school or something.

As to the rest of the title, I noticed that I've been keeping late hours lately. Usually this means that I'm avoiding something, and I think I know what it is. Ah well.

Also, today I've been thinking about two creative pursuits - writing and costume-making. I have to make a costume in the next three weeks or so for my History of Clothing and Costume class, based on the theme of "fashion victims", and I want to make a costume for Friday for the upcoming drag ball - the theme being "anything but clothes". Both costumes would need to use found objects, so I thought I could just use one for both. The big question is whether or not I can get anything together in time for the ball. Certainly trying to do drag and fashion victim at once makes it a little harder, but I'll think of something (hopefully).

Back in high school I saw a cartoon that explained the history of the United States in terms of white people being afraid of everything. Apparently it's from "Bowling for Columbine" (which I'm pretty sure I saw as well).

I remembered this because recently I've been watching a series called "Hetalia Axis Powers", a loosely historical but very silly show in which the countries are people. I just watched episode three, which is set just before/during World War II and mainly features Italy and Germany. I find Germany adorable, and it kind of bugs me... he's a Nazi at this point, yes? Or at any rate a nation of Nazis... trying to think about countries as people is hard. At any rate, so far the show is mostly from Italy's perspective, and Italy really likes Germany, but thinks France is a bully, etc.

Another example is School House Rock. At my middle school we mostly did the grammar ones ("conjunction junction, what's your function," "Mr. Morton is the subject of the sentence, and what the predicate says, he does," etc.) and the math ones, in part because we had the same teacher for math and English and she liked Schoolhouse Rock, and perhaps in part because the history ones seem really outdated. They're from the seventies and eighties, and they're very patriotic, very whitewashed, and very into the melting pot, from what little I was able to sit through.

Animaniacs takes a more snarkily humorous approach to educational programming - their educational segments are also musical, but somehow connected to a silly scenario such as a contest, and performed in a silly manner, like the anatomy of the brain segment or the state capitals one.

Education is always political - no matter how careful teachers are to keep their politics out of the classroom, and in American public schools up through high school, they're often very careful, their politics and those of the school come through in the curriculum. Not only are patriotic gestures, such as students having to recite the pledge of allegiance, important, but so are the questions of what is included and excluded, as well as the phrasing used. The American public school system, and especially the 'social studies' classes (more or less a mix of history, geography, and area studies) are oriented towards legitimizing the U.S. state (that is to say the existence and authority of the United States as a nation) and forming students into patriotic citizens.

This becomes increasingly clear as I study more international history as well as the history of native Americans and blacks - my history classes before university continually glossed over the histories of slavery, segregation, and of the native peoples of this continent, as well as U.S. colonial interventions and the continuing effects of racism, sexism, etc. Certainly these classes acknowledged the existence of at least some such atrocities, but there was no in-depth description or attempt at analysis.

English classes, too, exemplify this trend - I'm far from the first to note that most authors considered notable or literary are dead white men. Women's writings and the writings of people of color are often excluded, to the degree that there have to be specific classes to study them, and even then, 'genre' fiction is rarely the object of study. Certainly it's impossible to please everyone or to arrive at a perfectly balanced curriculum, but more variety and more choice for students would both certainly help.

I also don't believe that one always has to read things that are difficult in order to learn from reading. Certainly the learning is more obvious when the material is somewhat challenging - one picks up a good deal of new vocabulary and background information - but even easy material can teach the reader a lot about structure, pacing, genre conventions, literary devices, that sort of thing - especially useful for writers. Then, too, reading ultimately needs to be fun in order for students to start reading on their own (the best, and perhaps only, way to attain really high-level literacy). In order for reading to be as fun as possible, there need to be few constraints, so that readers can choose material that interests them, likely at a level they find either easy or moderately difficult. Level of interest is more important than level of difficulty, though - I, for one, am often willing to push through a difficult piece if it is fascinating, but may stop reading an easy thing if it is deathly dull. I feel like classes that force students to follow a prescribed set of materials are largely responsible for students who do not like to read and write, or in the case of foreign language classes, do not enjoy using the language, find it frightening or unpleasant, etc.

This got pretty long and rambly, so I'm going to cut it off here and maybe continue it in a later entry.

Last Thursday in section, as I sketched some of my classmates in order to stop being bored out of my skull, I realized that it would be a good idea to dedicate time every day to drawing in the hopes of someday not sucking. These days about all I do drawing-wise is sketch garments for my history of fashion class and sketch classmates if I get really bored. Otherwise I would aimlessly doodle and write more angry marginal notes than I already do. :)

So anyway, the idea I had was to do a drawing month inspired by NaNoWriMo - something like sketch for an hour every day. Or do a certain number of drawings in a month. Turns out that such an event already exists, but I'd rather do it sooner than November, because I'm impatient like that.

Anyway, for the particularly brave, I have the least-awful classmate sketch.
( Clicky )

I heard they were going to replace this mural, so I took a picture of it. Looking at it now, I notice that the table is one of the weird ones... there are several like it in the area. Behind the mural you see an example of the campus housing.

Today it was cloudy, which made me happy... I was beginning to worry that we weren't going to get any more winter here, such as it is, after several days of warm, sunny weather. I was glad to be inside by the time it rained in earnest, though. I was also glad that my shoelaces were rainbowy... on January 3rd I bought them to replace my grotty old ones. Anyway, they're sunny even when the weather isn't.

This reminds me - on National Blog Posting Month, this month's theme is change. I've gone through a lot of changes over the past few years, and one of them is that while I used to be very easily depressed, I am now fairly cheerful most of the time, and I find it much easier to deal with difficult and stressful situations. Rain, for instance, used to tend to make me (more) depressed, but now it doesn't, unless I'm having a particularly dreadful week. Which honestly has only happened once or twice a year for the past couple of years, so I'd say that's a pretty noticeable change.

Honestly, I'm not sure how it all happened, exactly - if I did, I could write a bestselling self-help book and make millions. All I know is that a few months after a difficult event that left me in a pretty bad place, I decided that things would have to change somehow - I couldn't see spending my life like that. I started to read self-help sites, and probably more importantly, I reached out to people. By the time school started back up again I was beginning to feel like maybe things might really be okay eventually. I kept reaching out, I tried new things, there were ups and downs, but things seemed to be getting better. That year I was living in a single dorm room on campus (the previous year had been an unpleasant double). The next year I found a place in the house where I'm living now. It was a vast improvement, and I was really excited about it. That year things kept getting better, and I learned to like kittycats thanks to my housemate's adorable kitty, Elliot. This year has been even better, a few graduation anxieties aside, and I hope I can take this energy into the rest of my life as well.

Well, that's it, I didn't take a photo today and I don't feel like taking a stupid photo to make up for it. So no more photo every day thing for me. I still plan to take lots of pictures, but there you go. I spent most of the day at the computer working on my essay due Wednesday, so not much to photograph.

Yeesh, I am tired. And tomorrow it's up early, so I can see the inauguration. It's my first one. For Clinton I was too young and didn't care much, and for Bush I didn't entirely care but at any rate I didn't want to.

On campus there'll be a dance tomorrow to celebrate Obama's inauguration (very leftist campus here), but I'm having a friend over in the evening, so I don't know if I'm going to bother. Most of the time the campus dances suck anyway... by which I mean that I don't like the music (mostly hip-hop and rap), no one I know goes, and they're very straight and uncreative with the dancing. Dancing should involve more than booty-shaking!

I'm feeling really ambivalent. Not sure about my essay (it mostly answers the prompt, but probably not as well as I could have) but I still have time to revise... maybe. Nervous about Obama. Discontent with today's manglings of the French language. Discontent with the fact that I didn't get to work on my languages much today. Nervous as to whether I'll have enough time for everything. Not sure about next weekend. Blah.

I don't know. But note the Japanese battle flag design on the hood.

Today was kind of a mood-swingy day. I love the weather (warm and sunny!). I don't love that I'm starting to be busy with schoolwork. I don't love my cold, but it's funny that it's transnational, and I'm glad it seems to be letting up already. I'm not that in love with my classes - none of them are actively bad, but so far none of them are really interesting on a theoretical level. I guess I've been spoiled by the mind candy of recent classes, but one of them is a upper-division with a professor who taught a pretty cool class last quarter, so I think my high expectations were justified. I'm holding out hope that they'll improve, though.

I'm also trying to sort out the fact that in spite of being in general quite happy, I want something. I can actually think of a number of things I want, but I'm not sure whether any of them are the one that's bugging me. I suppose the best step is to just try to go for those things and see what happens. That means writing fiction more regularly (or, er, at all) and being more clear with what I want out of relationships (currently, not romantic ones... still single). I suppose that wanting things is what keeps us moving, keeps life interesting, et cetera. But I do feel kind of selfish about the whole thing as well.

Also? Both excited and apprehensive about Obama. Bet I'm not alone in this one.

Ok, not all in French, but I'm going to link to some stuff in French, so that's how I'll start. Scroll down for English, k?

Je suis un cours de français et pour la dernière classe il faut soit faire de la cuisine, soit apporter quelquechose de français qu'on a acheté, soit parler d'un repas super (ou bien terrible) qu'on a mangé. Je ne sais pas si l'on peut faire de la cuisine allemande par exemple, si la recette est en français, mais bon moi je veux faire quelquechose de français.

J'hesite entre:
la tarte aux pommes
la tarte au chou-fleur
ce gateau à la mélisse et à la menthe mais où trouver de la mélisse?
le clafoutis à l'abricot et aux pistaches mais où trouver des abricots fraîches maintenant?

Ok, English

I'm taking a French class and we have to either cook food, bring French food we bought, or talk about a meal we had (good or bad). I don't know if we can make something say German if the recipe is in French, but I want to make something French.

I'm thinking of:
an apple tart
a cauliflower tart/quiche (?)
this mint and lemon balm cake but where do I get lemon balm?
an apricot-pistachio clafoutis but where can I get apricots this time of year?

I remember hearing in French class that the word "passion" in French means an intense feeling/emotion, good or bad. So a passion could induce suffering or could be very positive, almost too much to take. It's a concept that sees a lot of play in religious types of media, wherein the presence of God or another deity would be too bright and pure for a mortal to take. You could go blind, like staring into the sun. I seem to remember something of the sort in at least one of the Narnia books.

When I say my passions, I mean more or less positive things, I guess. But these are things that I increasingly find myself bound to, to some extent. As in I get depressed without them. They're needs for me, not just wants.

The short list, in no particular order:
-foreign languages/the study thereof, especially French
-fiction writing
-music (listening)
-theatre
-activism

I think all of these are things that round out my person, beyond who I am in class. I'm a very successful student. The only subject I've been unsuccessful in is physical education. But succeeding in school doesn't make me feel fulfilled. I'm not sure I want to be in school, now that I'm halfway to graduation from university, and considering grad school.

I would ideally want to be sort of a wandering jack-of-all trades who writes and is at least moderately known for it. But I'm petrified that if I pursue that route I'll end up penniless and destitute, which in the U.S. of A. is not a good thing to be. Last night my landlord was talking with one of his friends about how he's scared here of losing everything, whereas in Europe he always knew he had a safety net - he'd get health care even if he lost everything, etc.

I feel a tension with the world around me - I wish I could push it aside, or change it with my own hands, but instead the best I can do is to resist its squishing me. How do I produce myself, simultaneously resistant and in collusion with its forces. Because our society lives in the power of the mind, institutionalized terrorism (also known as the criminal justice system, the Department of Defense, mass media, etc.).

I don't think the problem is with my major - Feminist Studies is fine. It's that the system, no matter how empowering the subject matter, remains the same - violent in that it forces people into boxes. Not to mention the literal violence - rape is shockingly common, police use violence against peaceful protesters, etc.

I wonder if I'm a "credible threat"?