Fun with receipts

We stopped at the market on the way home to pick up some essential supplies (I am not proud of this, but Diet Pepsi with Lime is a drug I depend on to function in my daily life) and in the bakery section we found some nice fresh-baked bolillos. "Bolillo" is just Spanish for "roll," so they're ordinary roundish white-bread rolls, and we got a bag full.

I was just now entering the debit-card transaction into my files, when I noticed what it said on the receipt. While the bin was clearly labeled "bolillos," the receipt identifies our purchase as "Ethnic Bread." (Do you think if I bought their challah, it would show up as "Religious Bread"?)

Oh, and here's another one! We purchased two boxes of Swanson's brand chicken broth, and the abbreviation that shows up on the receipt is "Swan Broth." I wonder if that's tastier.

General sense of inadequacy, soothed by food

Yet another weekend has gone by in which I have not enjoyed enough free time, nor have I gotten done all the things that were on my weekend list to do. I keep wrestling between the desire to buckle down, work the whole weekend, and at least get caught up on everything, and the desire to just take a day off and goof around a little and restore my sanity a bit, and I end up not doing either very well.

So, for a quickie post, I'll take up Phantom on her request for food blogging. This paradoxically can serve as a response to both the question "what's for dinner?" and the question "what are you craving that you can only get in Spain?" because my husband has attempted, for the first time, to reproduce my Awesome Sister-in-Law's famous albondigas. Literally this just translates as "meatballs," but that doesn't really do them justice, because they're meatballs cooked in a special secret sauce, served over crispy potatoes. I've never had them prepared this way outside of Spain, but LWI spent a chunk of time this afternoon slaving over the secret sauce, and oh baby does it smell good.

While he was doing that, I whipped up another favorite recipe, my Awesome Sister-in-Law's famous yogurt bread. I find this recipe oddly entertaining because it measures everything in proportion to the size of yogurt you use, so you just use the empty yogurt container to measure the other ingredients: two yogurts of yogurt, two yogurts of sugar, three yogurts of flour, half a yogurt of vegetable oil. (See, I'm chuckling just typing that out. I am so easily entertained, it's an embarrassment.) That plus three eggs (whip the whites first, and then mix in the yolks, then stir in everything else) [oops - and a couple of teaspoons of baking powder!] and a handful of frozen berries and/or chocolate chips, baked for 40 minutes or so, and you have yourself an excellent breakfast for the week.

It may sound from these two examples that we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves in the kitchen without my Awesome Sister-in-Law. The truth is that we managed for some time without her recipes, but we don't quite remember how, and truly those were darker days.

Apprehensive

Purple_Kangaroo just left me a nice comment on an old post (thanks, PK!), old enough that I had to go back and re-read it because I had no memory of what it was about, and in the process of looking for it I glanced over all the posts from that month (March 2005). And that made me realize, goddamn, this blog used to be a lot better. I don't know if it's fall, which always makes me a bit fuzzy, or a phase of mild depression, or just the usual mid-semester weariness, but I haven't had thoughts that clear and interesting for some time.

But I shall carry on, and perhaps the Fun Witty Pilgrim will eventually come back out from her hiding place in the dark corners of my head.

jo(e) asked me about my earliest memory, which is interesting because I have very, very few memories of my childhood, up until about the age of twelve. Nothing traumatic; it's just that I was the youngest of six children, and my mother was tired of having kids, and both of us were eager for me to get through the whole childhood business as quickly as possible so we could get on with our lives.

But my father and I had some very close moments, and one of those I remember vividly. It was fall, cool enough that I was wearing the fuzzy purple coat that I loved, and we were walking through the leaves in Centennial Park. I was four or five years old, and there was something I was worried about - perhaps the first day of school, or some new event I wasn't sure how to handle. I was trying to explain to my father how I felt, but I didn't have the right words. I wasn't afraid, really, because it wasn't a scary thing; I wasn't nervous, because I was pretty sure I could handle whatever it was; I just had a vague sense of unease at the unfamiliar situation coming up.

My father listened to my attempts to describe this feeling, and then he smiled and looked at me and said very carefully, "You are apprehensive!" And oh, the wonder of having the word that captured exactly that feeling. I sounded it out - app-re-hen-sive. Yes! That's what I was. Ideas have colors and shapes in my head, and words are like the boxes we use to convey them to other people; the goal is to find a box of the right shape and size so that it won't distort the fragile idea that it carries. I love finding the right box, and I love that my earliest memory is of my father helping me find one.

Handouts

So here's another question (dang, you guys are better than a Magic Eight Ball!). As I proceed along the paths of academia, I keep finding myself in new territory for which I am wholly unprepared. There seem to be unwritten Codes of Conduct for all sorts of academic situations, and I figure them out as I go along, but geez, I wish someone would write these all out in a nifty book.

The latest issue: when you publish a book, and your publisher sends you a handful of free copies, to whom should you give copies? I know some of this is a matter of personal choice, in regards to friends and family. But are there standard recipients in one's academic hierarchy?

It's obvious to me that I should give a copy to my graduate adviser, because this book is an offshoot of my dissertation project, and I am deeply grateful to her for her guidance and support. But I was discussing this question with a friend of mine who has also recently published her first book, and she was told by a colleague that she should give a copy to the dean, in a tone that suggested duh, everybody knows you give a copy to your dean! My dean is awesome, but it hadn't crossed my mind to give her a copy of my book. Now I'm wondering what else isn't crossing my mind? My provost was unusually supportive during a moment of tenure-related crisis; I would rather like to give him a copy as a sign of my gratitude as well. But if I give copies to those two, should I also give one to my department chair, who is a very nice person but who was minimally involved in my tenure decision, and probably could care less? Should I give a copy to a colleague at my previous place of employment, who gave me a copy of his book when it was published? I'd like to do so as a gesture that I still value him as a friend and colleague, but I'm also a little concerned that it would look too snooty. Previous place of employment was a small teaching-oriented liberal arts college, which I left in part because it gave virtually no support for research, and I don't want it to look like I'm saying "Hey, it took you over twenty years to publish your first book, but here I did mine in four!"

Okay, now I'm just getting into psychological games. The real question is this: are there standard people to whom one conventionally gives copies of one's first book? Please keep in mind that my book was published by a press that only publishes in hardback and slaps a hefty price tag on its books; I have six free copies, but can't easily afford to invest in more. Where should they go?

Hate that when that happens

Yesterday in one of my upper-level courses, we were discussing a rebellion against a sixteenth-century ruler who had just inherited his throne. The students had read the demands of the rebels, and we were discussing their perspective, their demands for greater local rule, and their resistance to this new ruler whom they neither knew nor trusted.

I then asked them what the ruler's perspective would be regarding these demands. Without missing a beat, one student responded ruefully, "Well, it'd really mess up his king vibe."

Chop chop

So I finally finished my review of the Nasty Stinky Book (which turned out to be not all that nasty and stinky, just moderately troublesome). Relieved and happy to get the thing off my to-do list, I went back to the original instruction sheet to make sure I was doing the heading and the formatting and all that stuff properly. Everything shipshape, all I needed to do was print... on A4 paper. It's a British journal, and they want an actual printout as well as a copy on disk mailed to them across the Atlantic.

Those of you who have ever been anywhere outside the US are probably familiar with A4 paper; it's just a shade bigger than our regular 8 1/2 x 11. It's another product of the metric system, which means that most civilized people in the world use it but us. My software lets me format a document for A4; my printer has a setting for A4; now all I needed was the paper itself.

The campus bookstore? Nope. Office Depot? Never heard of it. (Seriously - they had no idea what I was talking about.) Fortunately I began my quest by making phone calls rather than driving around town; something deep in my brain must have suspected that this wasn't going to be as easy as it ought to have been. After six calls to major office supply stores, I only found one person who even knew what A4 meant, and she didn't have any.

I ranted in fury to the Left-Wing Intellectual, who said "Did you check the office? I'm sure I've seen some lying around in the office." I didn't believe him, but asked him to go look for some; it would keep him out of my hair while I yelled at the office-supply people, and on the off chance he was right, he would totally make my day. He turned up triumphantly a few minutes later with a stack of paper that looked...suspiciously long. No, it was just our non-metric next size up, 8 1/2 x 14. "Thanks, but sorry, hon, that's just a little bit too large."

Hey. Wait a minute. That's just a little bit too large.

One rendez-vous with the paper-slicer, and voila, the 8 1/2 x 14 inches are magically transformed into the desired 210 x 297 millimeters. Do you think they'll notice?

Challenges

B* had a nice post the other day about how “people attend to details about us that we might not ever notice.” This reminded me of a wonderful conversation I had with GoldenFriend the other night. Golden and I went to college together, and we’ve kept in touch off and on ever since, even though at this point we haven’t seen each other for a few years. Most of the time months will go by between conversations, but one of us always breaks the silence, and we always manage to find a connection again. This is something I treasure.

She called me a few nights ago, and during our conversation (especially with all the recent kids-off-to-college posts I’ve read in the blogosphere), it struck me that Golden and I met for the first time on our first day of college, almost exactly twenty years ago. Twenty years! So I asked her: Golden, you sound the same, you have the same sense of humor, I still think I know what matters to you and what your days are like. But it’s been twenty years since we’ve met, and we haven’t been around each other much for the last sixteen of those twenty. What’s different about you now? How should I adjust my mental image of you to match the person you are now?

Golden and I love these kinds of topics, so she took that question and ran with it, and we had a fascinating conversation. As part of this, of course, she tossed the same question back at me. I responded that in some ways I’m more brave than I used to be, because I have more experience and I’m more confident in my abilities. But in some ways, surprisingly, I’m less brave. There are things I did without thinking twenty years ago that just boggle the mind now (arriving in the Bangkok airport in the middle of the night with no idea of where I was going to stay is one example that comes to mind). I’m glad I did those things while I did, because the thought of them terrifies me now, and I have no idea where I got the nerve to do them them. At this point Golden interrupted me and said “But one of the things I most vividly remember you telling me then is that sometimes you did things precisely because they scared you. You said that if something was scary just because it was a challenge, that was a better reason to do it than not to do it, and that’s exactly why you flew off to Bangkok. That was always one of the things I admired most about you.”

What’s funny is that I don’t remember saying that at all, but here she’s carried it around for twenty years as part of her idea of me. (And, come to think of it, that is exactly why I flew off to Bangkok.) I’ve been facing some interesting professional opportunites lately, and they’re both exciting and scary. I’m afraid of making big commitments; I’m afraid of making a mess in front of lots of people; I’m thinking that maybe the common-sense thing to do would be to back off a bit, save my strength, not get over-burdened.

But now I wonder - maybe I should look at myself through Golden’s eyes, and take the advice I gave myself twenty years ago. Why the heck not?

High praise

Back from a brief cat-petting break, I paused by LWI's desk and dropped a kiss on his cheek as he was hard at work preparing a class on modern Germany.

His response: "Ah, that's much better than Hitler."

Curses!

My time in Spain is almost over, and I have only one day left in the archive where I've been spending mornings working on a new project. I'm looking for particular bits of information without being sure of exactly where I might find them (possibly in university records, possibly in Inquisition files, possibly in royal pardon requests...), so I've been doing lots of skimming through different kinds of documents to see how promising they look. So far I've found just enough to make me think that this project is doable, though it will continue to involve lots of sifting through files to find just a few tasty little crumbs.

I had one last section to glance at today, and I'd left it for last because I suspected it would involve even more skimming for even fewer useful bits, and because it's very poorly catalogued - the catalog only says that there are 80-some boxes covering three centuries, so I had to choose a box more or less at random hoping to land somewhere near the mid-1600s. I opened the box, and was disappointed to find that the documents were not what I expected - they dealt with the right people, but contained entirely different kinds of reports from what I thought they were going to have. (Plus they were from the 1730s, and I'm just not a big fan of the eighteenth century.) I nearly returned the box right away, but then I thought I should skim through a few more files to see if they were all the same. They seemed to be, but one of them bore the name of a small town I visited last year and really liked, so I took a closer look more out of nostalgia than anything else. Lo and behold - towards the end of each file, and entirely unexpected given the particular information these files contained, there was exactly the kind of information I'd been looking for. It was in every single file, and there were 65 files in the box I was holding.

I have only one day left in the archive. I don't know whether to celebrate like crazy, or jump off a bridge.

Generations

One of the things I occasionally marvel at is how gracefully my in-laws duck all questions of religion and politics, given the striking and potentially painful differences in perspective caused by Spain's transition from dictatorship to democracy in the late 1970s and the drastically reduced role of the Catholic church. My parents-in-law are devout Catholics and politically firmly conservative; their four children belong to the generation that rejected Franco and celebrated his death. My oldest brother-in-law has stories of being in college when armed policemen came into the classroom to take his too-liberal professors away (and that particular image comes into my head more and more often these days; who knew that fascist Spain would end up being a more genuinely liberal democracy than the U.S.?).

Despite these differences, though, everyone's remarkably good about respecting everyone else's views in the household, and no one says anything to offend. Yesterday on the afternoon news there was a report of how the European parliament has issued an official condemnation of Franco and his government, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish civil war. Although we were all in the room, the only commentary came in the form of faint snorts of derision from all: ours signifying exasperation that it came seventy years too late ("breaking news! fascism was bad!"), and the parents' at the thought that the European parliament would presume from afar to condemn the system they grew up with, which gave them nothing but stability and prosperity.