The Sex and the City movie is coming out soon, and anywhere I read about it I see a discussion of whether SatC is feminist or anti-feminist--or in general, pro-women or anti-women.

( my thoughts )

I just started reading Covering by Kenji Yoshino, and I'm sure I'll want to write about it later. But I did recently read Snow Falling on Cedars, after years of hearing what a good book it is. I liked it... but most of the best elements reminded me of other books, like Farewell to Manzanar or To Kill a Mockingbird. I did love the setting though, which was beautifully described and made me lust to eat strawberries.

I recently watched two romantic movies, one that made me feel lovey and happy and one that made me really depressed. The one that made me happy was Before Sunset (I watched Before Sunrise last summer), and I immediately ordered Before Sunrise to make Ben watch them both. :) Such unique movies, and really romantic. We watched Conversations with Other Women last night, which was excellent in a lot of ways. In the end I found it really depressing though, I think because it tapped into a fear I've mentioned before that relationships can end even if people really love each other, for complex and tricky reasons (see: my parents). This has got to be my biggest fear with marrying Ben, not that he is somehow wrong for me, but that I will somehow manage to lose him anyways. It's not a very rational fear, and at this point we have analyzed our compatibility far beyond what's necessary anyways. I think the strongest impetus to take marriage seriously is to watch people very close to you get divorced. Anyhow, the movie was excellent but sort of disturbing because of how it made me think of that. I'd still recommend it, though.

Awhile back I loved the PC games Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic I and II (though II was obviously not really completed). Ben played Mass Effect a couple months ago and loved it and kept telling me how it was like KotOR but bigger, with better graphics, better storylines, and overall a lot more innovation and enjoyable gameplay. I finally started playing Mass Effect recently, and it is a lot of fun: a huge universe to explore but in a single-player game. I am maybe halfway through? There's a huge number of side quests, a lot of good gameplay, though some flaws in the game. I also recently played Portal (I got it for Ben for his birthday), which is a much shorter game and in my opinion, a nearly perfect game. It is clever, interesting, has very innovative gameplay, and is incredibly funny. I can't overrate it; it is so fun I wish it had been longer, but that is part of its perfection. Especially the very last scene, with the cake.

And I bought three CDs recently and overlistened to them a lot. I continued a fine, storied tradition of mine of stealing music recommendations from other people and loving them so much I spread the music to my friends. I got CDs of Ekova, Octopus Project, and Federico Aubele and have been loving them. Spread the love!

Book: The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss. It is a book about... a book called "The History of Love". It's really beautiful, interesting, well-painted, and painfully sad. I read it basically in one sitting today and was moved.

TV: The Wire. We started watching this in the fall, after a stellar review in the New Yorker and hearing a lot of good things about it, and now we're halfway through the second season. Wow, what an amazingly well-done show! The acting, the story, the music, the realism.... I can't recommend this highly enough.

Music: Did you know that Yo Yo Ma did a series of recordings of Central Asian/Turkish/Silk Road music? I found out about this recently, after loving his album Obrigado Brasil for a while, and I just love what he does with the music. The recordings are When Strangers Meet and Beyond the Horizon, both listed under Silk Road Journeys.

And there are some things you can keep yourself busy with if your tastes are anything like mine.

I'm sure you can guess, when I came home from teaching on Friday to find Ben at home, I was quite happy. His trip went well, he took fun pictures that he showed me, and he brought back some sake and a small tapestry. The main session of his conference was in a No theater! How cool is that!

We had sort of a lazy weekend since Ben was a bit jetlagged, or at least kind of in the wrong time zone. I made sourdough pancakes on Saturday, we watched The Wire, I went for a run, and then we went to Uzu with Aimee, Ben's sister, who was in town for a psychology conference. We had a great time talking, walked to Naked Chocolate and had toffee caramel Belgian waffles, and then walked down to that mural I really like at Broad and Lombard. It was a lot of fun; she's a cool person to talk to. And today... ugh, so I want things to be clean for guests at Thanksgiving, like really clean, so we spent a huge amount of time cleaning the upstairs of our house really thoroughly. I can't believe how long it took, but we really did everything, so I'm pretty happy about it. I don't think the downstairs should take nearly as long, but then it does include the kitchen. BAH.

We got pizza for dinner, and watched the movie Down By Law which someone clearly recommended to me at some point, maybe Ron. It was great; really funny and strange, and Ben pointed out it was similar to a stage play with minimal reliance on sets or large casts, but a lot of great dialogue and interesting interactions. Plus it has the strange combination of Tom Waits and Roberto Benigni, before he was known much at all.

I'm trying to think of idiosyncratic Christmas presents for people. It's hard.

Through the power of Netflix, Ben and I recently watched all of Rome, an HBO historical drama that aired for two seasons and then stopped due to its immense production costs. I enjoyed it a lot; the show is beautiful and enveloping, and well acted. They do an interesting job with historical accuracy, which sometimes makes it difficult to watch. It's sometimes gruesome, and the class structures and sexism are accurate but make you wince. And every once in a while, you wonder if they are showing more sex than is strictly necessary. It's very interesting though, and I highly recommend it. Most of all, it's fascinating if you're interested in the historical aspects, and it makes me a little sad that my friend who's most into that is also not very tolerant of violence, and thus will probably never watch it.

We also watched A Better Tomorrow, a seminal film in Hong Kong action cinema. It was melodramatic at times but overall really well done, and apparently such a big hit in HK that trenchcoats like the one Chow Yun-Fat's character Mark wore are called 'brother Mark's coat' in colloquial Cantonese (assuming wikipedia can be trusted, that is). We also watched Rififi recently, I think from mr_ron's suggestion, and that was a very good movie. Of course, recently I'm having a hard time fitting in movies on weeknights, what with raiding in WoW. But this week, Ben is extra busy too, preparing to go to Japan on business.

I read an article recently in the New Yorker about the show The Wire which made me really want to start watching it, so that's on our Netflix queue too. And we keep downloading and watching Heroes every week... and every week I make fun of it, and wonder why we keep watching it. It has such an interesting plot but the execution is often so terrible.

Returning to weekends with Ben is easy, comfortable, delightful. We went to the Italian Market to get stuff for cold vegetable soups on Saturday, then took a picnic of blue cheese, bread, and wine to Fitler Square where we played cribbage and read things, he the New Yorker, me Flow. We had a lot of moving kind of things to do around the house, to move our computer stuff back into the office, and to move things back into the office closet that are taking up the space Ben's clothes are supposed to be in. Sunday was a day around the house, partly because it rained nonstop all day, and partly because there were things around the house to do. We made Cold Avocado Soup, which was very tasty though it needed more lemon or lime juice. Time with Ben is bliss: silly comments, eating lime wedges with cayenne, pinching, constant physical affection. Talking about the future.

We bought plane tickets for the holidays already, to get them cheaper and to make it easy for us to visit all of our parents. This means a tour of four households, which is a little long and silly, but it'll be nice to spend winter break together for the first time. After Ojai, I'll head up to Berkeley for a couple of days, since the extra cost isn't too bad. I asked Joao if that was an okay time to come, and he mentioned that he and Gersende might be moving back to Europe early next year, though they'll definitely not have moved yet in January. But already a lot of BFCers are leaving Berkeley, since most of them were postdocs, and Ron will be traveling, and lots of the people who made the last part of my time in Berkeley so great will be gone. It's sad to watch that happen to a place you've left, and it makes me a little nervous because that's how I came to be less emotionally tied to Los Alamos. Though, of course, the emotional ties that remain between me and New Mexico are permanent. I was happy this weekend, at Trader Joe's, to taste New Mexico Pinon Coffee, really enjoy it, and see the NM flag on the label.

We watched Une Femme Est Une Femme this weekend, at the end of my summer glut of foreign films, and I really liked it. I especially liked the note the movie ends on, though I assure you I don't intend to make a habit of closing out entries with French movie quotes.

E: Angela, tu es infâme!
A: Moi, je ne suis pas infâme. Je suis UNE femme.

I am doing pretty well with the whole hot summer thing, except on days when I get up early and go running. On these days I cannot convince my body to stop sweating until I get to my over-air-conditioned lab, which is sometimes 1.5-2 hours later. That is a lot of sweating, and it makes me cranky.

I got my jazz piano books, as well as a new book of Debussy. The jazz is fun but weird, since it's so against my training. It also doesn't help that I practically never learned music theory, I just play songs. The improv book is all, 'play the pentatonic scale in every key!', and I'm all, you can play it in different keys? And I'm bad at transposition and improv... I guess I play a lot by muscle memory. Well fine, to console myself I can play something from the Debussy book. Debussy is a composer that really resonates with me, and I find it much easier to know how his music should sound when I'm playing than with other composers. It has Jardins sous la pluie, La Cathédral Engloutie, and a lot of other pieces I've liked but haven't actually played (i.e., they aren't in my other Debussy book).

I urgently recommend the movie Amores Perros, which is like Pulp Fiction with characters you empathize with, sometimes funny but mostly brutal and tragic. It was so good, and really I spent the whole summer without Ben watching sad foreign movies. Strangely, I watched it in French despite its being a Mexican film, because the subtitles didn't work but I could change the audio language (from Spanish to French... no English). I watched Bande à Part and enjoyed it too, but in a very different way.

Franz pense à tout et à rien. Il ne sait pas si c'est le monde qui est en train de devenir rêve ou le rêve monde.

Four lessons I learned from The Devil Wears Prada:

1. Anytime a woman rebuffs your advances, you should just follow her around and kiss her over and over until she gives in. 'No' just means 'kiss me again, you handsome devil!'

2. Having a successful career as a woman means you are a huge bitch. There is a direct correlation between how successful you are and how bitchy you are.

3. Any progress in your career which makes someone else unhappy is morally wrong. This is regardless of whether you chose to make them unhappy (like stealing an assignment from them) or it was decided by someone else (like a boss). If you are ever given something that someone else wants, you should quit your job.

4. If your boyfriend is unsupportive, sulky, and continually tells you that you are a bad person, you should quit your job to win him back.

I rented the movie having just watched Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer, which is an excellent movie. I had heard that in this one, Meryl Streep is great and everything else is not very good, which was accurate. And man, the moral framework of the movie rubbed me the wrong way every time it came up.

My knee is noticeably better today than yesterday. The swelling went down, and while I still can't walk comfortably on it, it's a good deal more comfortable than yesterday, and my range of motion is also improved. I am very relieved by this.

I've spent my convalescence thus far playing World of Warcraft, reading Count Zero by William Gibson, finding things to cook next week (Tunisian pepper stew!), and watching a few movies. American History X is the best movie I've seen in a long, long time, and I highly recommend it to you guys.

Now that I can't walk, I think about how good I had it just before I hurt my knee, when I was running and swimming pretty regularly. I'm not sure how quickly I'll be able to get back to that, honestly... I'll have to ask the physical therapist and see how I feel. It reminds me, though, of something I've been thinking about a lot, the tendency to not enjoy how great the here and now is, but rather idealize old times and look forward to things on the horizon. I've been thinking about it already because the first year of grad school isn't a lot of fun in some ways. When I went back to visit LBL and people asked how I was doing, when I said the work was hard they all did the same sort of knowing laugh. And although I always knew that this part of graduate school would be hard, and that wasn't why I came, it still depressed me some to be working my ass off on courses I had to do. But at the same time, this is it! This is what I really wanted for a long time! How can I not be enjoying every second of it? It's so important to enjoy the things we have, because if we don't, why bother having them? The aspect of my life which is by far the easiest to enjoy, though, is Ben. It's so fun to live with someone who's a good friend and fun to be around (as I already knew!) and it's been fantastic not having distance any more. Plus the whole 'will we ever be together' thing had put so much strain on our relationship... it feels very easy to just enjoy ourselves now. I need to figure out a way to put that nowness into the other parts of my life as well.

My life is sort of leaning towards, uninteresting combination of classes and teaching, which can be tedious. I am squeezing in piano some days, and taking a yoga class and swimming in free time and suchlike, but mostly I am taking courses whose end I eagerly anticipate. Let me describe them to you!

( courses )

On a completely unrelated note, for those of you who've seen Cowboy Bebop... do you remember the episode where someone flies the space shuttle Columbia, and has trouble landing because the heat tiles have come off? Hmm.

Ew, so I came into my office today in order to grade the homeworks for 101, and the heater near my desk is emitting a strange smell and dripping water onto the carpet. It smells burny and gross, and initially I thought I had some food going bad in my desk or something. Plus half of the homeworks weren't in my mailbox, so I couldn't do half of what I had planned.

I will not miss grading.

Ben and I had planned to get out this weekend, but on Saturday morning Ben came down sick... but not with the stomach flu! No, he got a regular cold, which mostly incapacitated him. So all we really did was go food/clothes/shoe shopping, and sit around our house and make tea, play cribbage, that sort of thing. I'm sort of afraid that I'll get the cold he has now, and obviously he won't get the stomach flu, because he would have gotten it by now. We've been watching some shows on our netflix, namely Cowboy Bebop and Rome (the HBO series). I like the art style and the music in Cowboy Bebop a lot, although the episodes we saw had a theme of, main characters stumble into elaborate plot, have some hijinks, and eventually let a huge bounty slip from their fingers. Rome is... well, it's very well-done, and although it feels similar to the many other classical civilization movies/tv shows I've seen, it's much more realistic, though that often means it's really gross. For example, we see people crucified much more graphically than I've seen (though I never watched The Passion), we see a soldier casually raping a shepherdess before going home to his wife, we see pornographic theater... we see all sorts of things that are definitely historically accurate, but are also often excised from tv shows.

I also played WoW some this weekend, and I mention this specifically for Erin and Josh... priest is a really fun class to be! My main is a shaman, but I am playing some with a priest that I initially created with Ben, and it's really cool... you can spec so that you hardly ever run out of mana, and you have lots of protection tricks that are far superior to what other classes have. You have a really good ranged weapon (wands) and even though you suck at melee, I don't even really notice. Plus priests are one of the most sought-after classes for endgame stuff and instances, although I'm not sure I'll really get this character up to 60. It just takes so long. But they are really fun to play.

I went to a movie last night for the first time in months (largely thanks to Netflix). Ben and I saw Casino Royale, the new Bond movie, and arguably the best one. Daniel Craig and Eva Green are really superb, and while it wasn't an excellent movie, it was a fun one. I realized that for me, all the recent Bond movies blend together, and all the old ones blend together. Ben argues that's because pretty much all of them are parodying Dr. No, unintentionally one presumes.

I spent some part of the movie worried about Ben's leg because while we were walking there, I distracted him with something funny and he walked into a fire hydrant. Ouch.

We have been using our netflix to watch Fullmetal Alchemist, which I would say is the best anime series I've watched. It's funny and cute, and serious and angsty, and has really interesting characters and stories. The movie was even rather good, and I had low expectations since anime movies that continue series are generally terrible. I highly recommend it to, well, everyone.

Recently we watched The Thin Man, which was very good if fairly different in tone from the novel. And we saw Ed Wood and Fear and Loathing back-to-back, which convince me that Johnny Depp is a really amazing actor. I think I'd seen Fear and Loathing before, but when I was 15 or so, so I didn't really get it... and I've read the book now, which is worthwhile. We watched the first Robin Hood movie from 1938, which was SO SILLY but very interesting. And On the Waterfront, Donnie Darko, and Howl's Moving Castle, all of which I really enjoyed. Nearly every movie we've rented has been good, how about that?

Btw, if anyone has any recommendations, I will gladly queue them if I trust your taste. ;)

I just got back from a truly awesome event, which was a block social at Grace, a tavern nearby. It turns out there are a lot of cool people on our block: several grad students, a lot of interesting professionals, and six architects, for some reason. It seems to be a rather transitory block, with only a couple people who have been here over 5 years. Our neighbor was the one who organized this get-together, and I think it would be great to do more along these lines. It was cool to start to associate names with faces. Plus it turns out that the food at Grace is great. One thing that was a little weird, though, is that our block (along with the rest of the Graduate Hospital neighborhood) is undergoing serious gentrification, so most of the people who attended this get-together seemed to be from the upper middle class (including us graduate students, who are technically poor but have a somewhat elite level of education). Not everyone on our street can be counted in this class, and I wonder if our future block events will be similarly stratified.

This weekend was really cool overall, actually. Ben and I did a lot of errand-running. We went to New Jersey to stock up on wine, which was actually very successful, as there was a store with a good selection and good prices not more than ten minutes' drive into NJ. We also bought gas, and I have to say, it was bizarre to see gas prices under $2 a gallon. I'm not a believer in PO yet, yfdp, but your entries have made me a stauncher believer in the value of alternate energy sources. We also went to Fabric Row and got some fabric for our living room decorating plan, and some posters. I realized that Joao and Gersende will be here in less than three weeks and I sort of want our living space to look more... moved in to. We're all settled in, but most of our walls are still blank. We have to get on the ball here!

Going to watch Naruto with Ben... btw, we've been watching Full Metal Alchemist on Netflix, and it's a really great series. Too bad we don't have any of it right now, thanks to the law-abiding means by which we got it.

So I like movies, and Ben and I like movies. We watched Rocky (because everyone in Philadelphia mentioned it) and A History of Violence last weekend. It's been something of an uphill battle to get Ben to watch foreign movies, though he liked Tampopo, and we do watch a lot of Miyazaki films together. And Ron, who is taking a really cool trip to Peru starting this weekend, loaned me all of his movies so that I could watch whichever at will. This is really cool because he's a movie buff, so I immediately found like 20 I really wanted to see, plus extras. I can't watch them all... but I can try! Anyhow, I was telling Ben about it on e-mail...

Me: Ron loaned me all his movies for three weeks!
Ben: Cool! Are there things you're really looking forward to watching?
Me: I went through it last night after he left and marked a bunch of movies I want to see, like 20. I probably won't get to some of them but it'll be fun. :) When I come down next weekend, I can bring them and we can watch stuff!
Ben: Oboy. Inscrutable foreign film.
Me: It isn't all like that! Lots of classic movies, westerns... in fact, he has Kiki's Delivery Service and another Ghibli film that I want to watch, that I could save for watching with you. Go ahead, eat them! Eat your words!
Ben: :P

I got an MRI Monday night but have still gotten no interpretation of it from my doctor. From an e-mail I sent my parents:

I called my doctor after the MRI last night to see if I needed to come
in, or if someone could just drop off the film for me, or what. They
said to come in and that he'd go over the report with me, and gave me
an appointment today. I finagled a ride there and went in with the
MRI film. The doctor then told me that the MRI place compiles a
report within 1-3 days, and he would call me and tell me what the
result of that was, and that's the thing that will really say whether
I have a tear or a strain. Then he said that the knee isn't his
specialty, and that I was about as qualified to look at the images as
he was, and then we went through them and he'd say things like "This
looks asymmetrical, that could be bad, or not, I dunno". So basically
there was no point in me going there, except that he ok'ed starting
very cautiously to use and stretch my injured knee.

Since then I've been using it a little. It can bear weight okay, but it hasn't got the full range of motion... I can bend it a little past 90 degrees, and I can nearly straighten it (though only when I'm 15 minutes into a hot bath). I came to work today and it's doing okay, though I didn't realize how hard it would be to walk from my house one block to the bus stop, or from my office to the cafeteria. I'm walking without crutches, a little unevenly. We'll see tomorrow whether or not I overdid it. I'm trying not to limp, but to walk slowly and correctly. It's sort of working. It's really nice to be out of my apartment, though.

As you might guess, I spent a lot of my convalescence reading, watching stuff, or playing WoW. I'm now halfway through Understanding Movies, which Ron lent me awhile back. It does a nice job of synthesizing storytelling and composition knowledge that I had from writing and photography and putting it in a film context, and it also is teaching me a lot. It really makes me want to watch more movies, too.

I obtained the miniseries that ends Farscape, and I watched it. I now proclaim that Farscape is the best sci-fi show I have ever seen. I really loved it, pretty much from beginning to end. There were episodes I didn't like as much, but no seasons I'd write off (which there were in other tv shows I've watched recently). A lot of it was just brilliant. I also got the first season of the new Doctor Who, from Ben, and watched it. It was really funny and enjoyable, although not fantastic stories or believability. But it was really fun to watch. This stuff makes me want to try Firefly or Battlestar Galactica and see if I like them. I've heard so many good things.

And yeah, I still love WoW and am glad I installed it before spending nearly two weeks at home not walking. It's a really fun way to pass an obscene amount of time. Those of you that play should tell me your characters and servers, so I can feel a sense of fellowship with you. :P

One of my favorite things about being home is seeing so many people. I went hiking down Otowi Mesa with my dad today, lots of mild rock-climbing in that typical New Mexico way, and had a great time. Although it seems like my camera is eating batteries like no one's business, which can't be good. Then I saw Jeanine and Andrew for a bit and saw pictures of their place in Indiana, the lab at Purdue where Andrew works, and some photos from their honeymoon in Colorado that were really pretty. And then there was a potluck at Steph's, with Steph, Scott, Ken, Sam, Sara and I. It was really cool to see Sara because she's Sam's little sister, and so I like her and am concerned for her well-being, but almost never see her, and never in a social situation. And she's cool and seems to be doing well, so that's good. I also gave Sam his present, which he really liked, and I have to say, I totally lucked out on giving people presents this year. I feel like I was able to get lots of people really good ones, mostly by chance, and that's really cool.

Oh yeah, and I finished Life of Pi and loved it, so you should all read that. The writing style and story are great, and it has one of the best endings I've read in a long time.

Tomorrow I have a breakfast with Jeanine, Andrew, and Sam, and then a fabulous eye appointment in which my pupils will most certainly be dilated, and then lunch with Tamie and Jen. And probably some time with my dad and maybe some movies. Oh yeah, we had Kay over for dinner last night and made chicken cacciatore and watched March of the Penguins, and then she went home and we watched episode III. You know, it's pretty good when you have low expectations.

In conclusion, other people are great.

So my luck hasn't entirely turned good; Juhi told me that her sister's wedding will be family only, and Juhi herself will be forbidden from leaving Calcutta while she's there, partly to do things for her sister before the wedding, bu also partly for safety reasons. Juhi and others tell me there's no sense in going that far just for Calcutta. So unless I can find another travel buddy who would be interested in going to more parts of India with me, the trip seems dead in the water. Damn.

On the other hand, I am spending most of my time at LBL to get new data for the Puerto Rico trip. I'm really excited, about everything about it. But the data-taking process is painfully long, especially since today we found a problem with my scan procedure due to the erase recovery time on my setup. Damn, damn, damn. It would be great if I could wrench all of my data out of the machine before giving it back to Max on Wednesday, but I acknowledge that this may not be possible.

All of you science-y people should check out The End of Certainty, by Ilya Prigogine. It's a sort of exploration of the connections between thermodynamics, irreversibility, quantum mechanics, and chaos, and a really well-written and interesting one. I don't think it's comprehensible on a lay-person level, but it's fascinating physics, and surprisingly multidisciplinary. I really enjoyed it.

Speaking of recommendations, I also highly recommend the movie Me and You and Everyone We Know, which was another SUPERB movie I saw last week for cheap. It was really interesting and creative and funny and deep, all the things a movie should be. See, Week-end, that's how you make my list of good movies instead of my list of weird movies. You just never learn.

1. The movie Weekend, which is a Jean-Luc Godard film. Watched it with Ron tonight and man... very weird. Good, certainly, but weird. Probably at the top of my list of weirdest movies of all time.

2. I found out that one of the people from my short fiction class with Loewinsohn is in the PAC-10 issue of Playboy. This is very strange to me.

3. My freestyle is too slow. Too damn slow, I say.

4. If a popular physics book is written by someone who's a physicist, rather than a journalist, it is generally not understandable or absorbable by laypeople. But they are absorbable to me, I'm finding, and they're really interesting. It's a shame that most of them are about cool theoretical ideas that I really wouldn't want to work on.

5. I was looking at a Mozart Sonata today, to see if I wanted to play it, and it was prominently featured in Weekend. Weeeeird.