Nicer Bigger Teflon Rellenos

I have learned several valuable lessons and/or pieces of information in the past week and a half, both in British Columbia and in the past few days back at home.

1) Canadians are just nicer than Americans. More polite, all of it, the stereotypes really are true. The buses in Vancouver actually flash two line messages saying "Sorry...Not in Service" instead of just "Not in Service." Now all our buses look rude and abrupt to me. Also, many Canadians really will apologize to you when you step on their toes. I actually tested this out repeatedly and, let's assume, unintentionally.

2) My snotty attitude toward nature on the East Coast (i.e., "you call that a tree? how cute," or "that puny hill is Mt. Such and Such?") being from the West Coast correlates almost exactly to the assumed attitude someone from BC could have to the Pacific Northwest, were they not so damned polite. It was just like the natural environment here. Except bigger. Everything was way bigger. Plus, fewer billboards, which just emphasized how freaking big everything was. It was an incredible week -- mostly we did a lot of hiking and oohing and aahing. We're definitely going back to Vancouver for a city fix, it's super-Euro and cool and we didn't get to spend much time there.

3) Lesson learned by our entire household upon our return: don't put a Teflon wok on the burner, turn it onto a relatively high heat with a little oil in it, and then answer the phone (roomie was making popcorn for our movie night). Let's just say, the fire was small and localized, but the fumes were unbelievably profuse. We all, plus kitty, literally locked ourselves in my room as the least-fumigated place in the house and watched Dreamgirls. Which was great. Or that could be the Teflon poisoning talking, who knows. I think it was great. Seriously, that stuff kills birds -- if my dissertation is poor quality now, I'm totally blaming the wok. It took two full days with the doors wide open to air the house out.

4) Screw Labor Day barbecues. The food to have in celebration of working people is definitely homemade chiles rellenos with beans and rice, fried plaintain chips and mango slices. Sadly, we eschewed the mojitos because the Teflon had already killed all of our brain cell quota for the week. But the rellenos, they were so good.

On Pleasure Bent Again...

I depart today for the rainy woods of British Columbia for the next week...I'm looking forward to a week of trees and lakes and wind and magic and a complete and total respite from academia and the petty to-do lists of daily life. It feels ridiculously indulgent to be able to take an entire week's break from my life. I will post pictures when I get back, in the meantime, I hope everyone else gets some sort of mental August vacation, however short or long, before the back-to-reality crunch arrives in September.

Nostalgia

Well, my class finished last week and I am now returning to the land of not writing lectures every day. It's kind of weird to be back. Suddenly organizing my desktop files holds tremendous appeal. The last day of class did, as predicted, bring on a lot of nostalgia. I am reminded of one of kungfuramone's post from a few weeks ago about the constant obsolescence of things, places, people in our wacky modern lives. I know so many intimate details of my students' lives after this class -- it may have been the nature of the subject matter, or my discussion style, but the range of personal experiences shared by the students with me and the rest of the class was amazing, and humbling as well. From abortions, to lynchings, to custody battles, to racial profiling by cops, to child abuse, to military experiences around the world, it was present in our little class and our conversations were richer and deeper for it. And now I find myself a) hating to grade them, hating it, hating it, hating it, I'm way too much of a mother hen for this part of the gig; and b) a little weirded out that I'll likely never see or hear from any of them again. We spent two hours a day every day having intense political, historical and personal conversations (I didn't really share personally, but they did hear a few stories from law school, including that of the infamous Texas party, and they certainly have a good idea of my political positions), and now it is done. It's just the nature of teaching, of course, but I've never had my own class before, so it takes an added adjustment to just saying goodbye at the end of a discussion section. Also, on the last day of class several of them actually asked if we could have a bonus class -- an extra class the next day despite the fact that it was their "dead week" day. They wanted to finish some of the topics we hadn't gotten to on my lecture outlines. It was very sweet, and I was tempted for a split second but my "you'll kick yourself later" sense jumped in and deferred. Always leave them wanting more, right?

I have finally updated my flickr account with photos from the fabulous tour of the east side of the mountains by Trust in Steel (sadly I didn't take enough, dumb battery) and photos from our month-long tour of county fairs, which is ultimately all about the adorable animals. And, this weekend, photos from J's graduation and celebration. Cupcakes were had. Pinatas were beaten down with baseball bats. Good times.

Next Summer: History of TV, Wine & The Rock and Roll Music 108*

The last day of my summer class is tomorrow, and while I am in some way (as predicted by Erin) melancholy because I always get all nostalgic and mushy at the end of things, I am also, you know, kind of looking forward to it. If by looking forward to it you mean desperately waiting for that glorious day to finally be here. If you can't tell from my (lack of) blog activity for the past three-plus weeks, I've been teaching a two-hour class daily for the past...three-plus weeks. It was a great experience, I do really enjoy the students, amazing opportunity, tons of intense discussions, learned a lot...blah blah blah! Let's face it, folks, I'll say the nice stuff about it later, right now I'm just really looking forward to not spending every single afternoon and evening (and the following morning before class) writing lectures. I would like to do the 80s dancing, watch the crappy television, and drink the nectar of the grape. I'm through being ProfessorLawyerMommy at least until school starts in the fall, and even then, I'm gleefully looking forward to having someone else lecture for a while.

This is all by way of reality-check, because in about two days (let alone two weeks) I will be all sad and missing my students and fondly reminiscing about our fascinating discussions. And that's fine, I know myself well enough to know that. I'm a softy, and I carry rose-colored glasses right next to my radical-feminist-Marxist red pair. But I will suggest for any of my fine friends who have the opportunity to teach a course on their own during PhD-getting-fun -- maybe don't try to teach the entire stretch of US history along with ten different major categories of law in a four week class. It may be a tad ambitious. Although I do feel like I have gone through my own version of law-school re-boot camp. Relearning the nitty-gritty details of contract law, corporations, family law, criminal law, constitutional law, property law, civil procedure and Indian law in the context of the whole history of the U.S. and then teaching it to non-lawyers and non-historians was definitely...educational. And it made me feel, for the first time since starting to read for comps, as though there may someday be an end point to this path that actually does involve running my own classes and doing my own research and reading. And that's a very, very good thing.

Now I am off to show off some mad LSAT skills. In future posts there will be pictures of the fabulous trip to the eastern side of the mountains as well as many, many photos from my tasting menu of local county fairs. Goats. They're cute.

*101 is just so obvious.

Off to PDX

Highlights from this week:

1) I've learned to love reading again. I actually started reading one of the books that was on my comps list and that I therefore barely "read" (Wilderness and the American Mind, by Roderick Nash). I had some vague ideas of the books' points before, based on the hard-earned comps skill of skimming, summing up and book reviewing. But then this week some other demanding person requested it, and as I brought it to campus to return, I opened it and rediscovered that I actually do enjoy reading the written word for sheer enjoyment. Wow! Ideas, words, thoughts for their own sake. I feel like I'm back from a long, weird trip.

2) Good people were in town! Kungfuramone and Beetlegirl swung through for some food, some catching up and some Hell's Kitchen. I still need to know how that ended.

3) I am currently addicted to the Gilmore Girls. It's all cute and snarky. I enjoy.

4) I compiled a coursepack for my class that begins next week. It's long. My students are almost all white male poli-sci majors (cough-pre-law-cough). Did I mention the coursepack is long? Why didn't I teach a class on pop culture and TV-watching? Or wine-tasting 101?

Now it's off to P-town for some family stuff, a Patty Griffin concert at the zoo, and the Columbia County fair, where I hope and expect to run into any number of my high school classmates, most likely with their three to six children in tow. Woo-hoo!

Priceless

One year's worth of library fines for 450 assorted monographs on US history and theory: $300. No joke.

Coffee. More coffee. Even more coffee. Frankly, I don't want to think about how much I spend in a year on this. Let's just call it a bajillion dollars.

Replacement pens during the last two months in which I frequently drained the ink from a pen a day on my notes: $30.

Passing my oral comps and never EVER having to go through that rite of passage again: You know what it is.

Yay! Took the comps, passed the comps, even felt good about my answers on the comps. It was actually, dare I say it, verging on fun (minus the nausea) to get to talk about things I find interesting with thoughtful, intelligent colleagues for a few hours. I got to talk about Foucault and Judith Butler as well as the US as a simultaneously postcolonial and colonial nation and, of course, race and class and gender. No one tried to nail me in any way, and the one professor I was afraid of seemed to like my answers the most and was the biggest pussycat of them all. It still hasn't completely sunk in that I'm done with this hurdle, but I'm getting there. I'm just glad I didn't, you know, freak out unnecessarily or anything. Ahem.

I cannot thank everyone enough for the love, support, understanding (especially those who had to deal with me at my most neurotic or talk me off ledges a time or two or twenty), coffee cards, singing cards, gifts, flowers, emails, phone calls, and for those in town yesterday, drinks and food and more drinks and more food. (At last! A chocolate butterscotch martini at the Excelsior for the Little Match Girl!) Pretty much, when I felt like throwing up for the 24 hours prior to the exam, I just thought about my awesome friends and felt better. I really don't think I've been this relaxed in about a year, so I'm going to enjoy it for a while longer before thinking about things like...what do you call them? Ah, yes, dissertations. Thanks again for the support! And for those who still have something like this to look forward to in their future: all will be well.

Here is the dazed, goofy smile that was plastered onto my face for about two hours straight after the exam:

State of the Field

1. Practice session yesterday with adviser went well. Despite the fact that she didn't ask me a single question from the subjects she was assigned and instead asked all kinds of outside things, I still managed to answer it all to both of our satisfaction. After forty minutes, she said "well, this is an interesting conversation, but I can't drag this out for you any longer -- you're ready." I have not had a single vision of my potentially-homeless self with the monograph-and-propaganda-lined shopping cart since. So, basically, I'm a much much much less crazy person today than I was three days ago. But of course it's all relative.

2. Ratatouille is an exxxcellent movie. Sneak in a wedge of artisanal cheese and a hunk of crusty bread if you can, because popcorn does not really cut it. If you like good food, you will like this movie.

3. Vote for Oregon. Do it. This state made Matt Groening what he was, it was our broken-down nuclear power plants (cough-Trojan-cough), our bumbling public officials, our crappy schools and depressed economy that led to the genius that is the Simpsons. We don't have all the fancy-pants "population levels" of say, a state like Illinois, but I'm hopeful we can get some West Coast solidarity and snag the California vote. So basically, Y. & S., we're relying on you. I don't count my former Oregon cronies now in California as people I need to recruit because once you've lived here, you're loyal FOREVER.

4. I'm not hiding completely as per KFR's suggestion for the Fourth, but there will be some white-trash junk food consumption, some unmitigated bitching about this country's leadership, and attendance at "Sicko" during the hottest part of the day. I feel that being difficult and ornery and non-patriotic (and also kind of trashy) is kind of the most patriotic thing one can do. For those in hiding, may the neighbor kids not torture you too much with loud bangs. For those at barbecues, check how long that macaroni salad has been sitting out. I'm just sayin'.