Ring In the New Year

As I thought back over 2008 this morning in the shower (an excellent contemplative space) I realized how much of a good year it was for me. I started out the year with a good job and a nice apartment; in March I went to Italy to see Carla, and in April I got into grad school. During the summer I spent many an evening with Heather drinking cheap riesling and eating pizza from Vas, and then Sean and I got engaged and managed to do half our wedding planning during the summer months, including moving our date from two years away to one. Finally, in the fall I moved to Philadelphia and started grad school. Really, this was a great year (and no one died, which is always a major plus). No complaints.

When I look back in the future I'll always think of the period from May 2007 to August 2008 as the transitional year or so, when I was just kind of treading water, waiting for the rest of my (academic) life to begin. I thought I'd miss Shelton, the same as I thought I'd really miss Fairfield, but I don't. I've found myself pretty adaptable to new circumstances, which is always the subject of jokes between Sean and I, as he is famously resistant to change and adapts slowly and uneasily to a new environment (example: see our torturous attempts to find mutually acceptable sleeping arrangements, subject of many a late-night argument as I fail to understand why he must occupy the entire bed, face down, limbs akimbo, forcing the other occupant to either curl up into an isosceles triangle or fight back against the encroacher).

But I do like Philadelphia, and it didn't take long for me to consider 213 E. Sedgwick my home, just as 46 Cliff St had been before it. 51 Whitney seems a long way in the past, now. Sometimes I count the years in terms of how many my mom never saw; it always surprises me to remember that she never saw 2007. I've found myself so many times imagining what she would say to this or that, what she would think of where I'm living now; I imagine giving her the grand tour and the way she would nod with that little smile of hers, not really saying anything, just quietly approving, and of course, how eager she would be to get back in the car, where Rocky would have his face in the window, and go home.

It's always difficult for me to play the what-if-game with my dad, to imagine how life would have been if he hadn't died. He was so much more the polarizing figure in the family, and I was only 14, still pretty malleable in terms of the future. Things could have been--would have been--wildly different, and I'm certain it would have been worse than the way it was without him. It seems a terrible thing to say, doesn't it? But I think of how angry and depressed he was, the fights we had, and how often I told myself I hated him and would never be like him, and I look at Jen now, who had a harder time with him and has still never forgiven him for, as she tells it, making her feel bad about herself every day. I never felt that way, and even if it's true I know that was never his intention. For every time he was mean or made me cry over some little thing, I remember a time of him telling me how smart Jen and I were, how we could do anything if we wanted to. I know he took out on us the stress he was under and the way he felt he'd failed us, which was never true anyway, and I forgave him for that a long, long time ago. It makes me feel sad for Jen that she won't let go of that bitterness, and that it's poisoned her memories of him, even the happy ones. I know he loved us, but I can't prove that to someone who doesn't want to believe it.

It's easier with my mom. She was there for college, she knew Sean, she saw me become the person that I still am--a far better and less bitchier daughter than the one my father ever knew. If he came back now he'd hardly know me. Conversely, I knew my mother better than I ever knew him, even if she was and will ever remain a mystery. So it's her I mentally inject into my new life, wondering about what her opinions would be about things.

I don't believe in a divine plan for human life. So often in hindsight it's tempting to see a pattern, to discern the guidance of some force where there is none, but I no longer attribute the timing of either of their deaths, the curious way in which things seemed to work out, to some larger cosmic scheme. I was fortunate. That's all there is.

I spent a lot of time in a post that's ostensibly about the past year talking about my parents, but I'm always thinking of them more at this time of year. Every year that passes carries me one year further from the time that they knew, as if they were frozen there, in 2000 and 2006, with an outdated version of me. Someday I will have changed so much from when I was 20 that I'll realize that my mom, too, would no longer know me. Or maybe she would have always known me; she was my mom, after all. All those years I was observing her, trying to figure her out, maybe she was observing me right back.

So here's to 2008, another good year, another year of being alive. And here's to 2009: may it live up to and exceed the bar set by its predecessor.

Still Carless

I just called the mechanic and apparently Toyota has not even sent them the new brake lines yet, and may not for another couple of days. Which is fine, I don't really need to go anywhere, although this means paying $10 to take the train into school tomorrow to sign one stupid piece of paper at the graduate school office and hand it over to the bursar. It's for my tuition-free-ness, which I do appreciate, Temple, I do, but they won't just mail me the piece of paper and let me sign it that way. No, I have to actually come in and take it up two floors and put it in someone's hand. Why? Who knows. Anyway, as I told the mechanic, as long as I have the car back by Friday, the day I'm heading back to CT, it's OK. He told me that he's just as interested in getting my car back to me, because it's his responsibility under his insurance as long as it sits in his lot. I hadn't thought of that.

I'm always hesitant about mechanics, not just being a woman, but because Heather C. told me stories of the terrible scams and shoddy work her boyfriend's coworkers used to perpetrate on the unsuspecting, like telling someone they need new brakes when they don't, and then producing a set of used brakes from some other job when the customer demands to see for themselves. But another benefit of living in a neighborhood like this one, according to Phyllis, is that they have to do good work for a fair price, otherwise word will spread quickly and they lose business.

I was unable to force myself to do much German work today. Ok, any German work today. Although I'm not one of those people who works well under serious, down-to-the-wire pressure, I'm learning that I do work best with some kind of a deadline in mind that I can threaten myself with, even if it's a far-off one. Alas, winter break furnishes none of that, and so I have trouble kicking my ass into gear. My deadlines are all fairly far off at this point. This is my to-do list for the next year and a half:

1.) Pass the German exam this semester, or I can't take comps in the fall
2.) Apply and get into the Rome program in February
3.) Once I'm in, read the following required "super-fun" texts in preparation for the course:

• Selections from On Painting, by Leonbattista Alberti

• Vision and Visuality, edited by Hal Foster

• Selected writings by Teresa of Avila

• Selected poetry by John Donne and Richard Crashaw

• "The Analytic of the Sublime" from Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment

• Selections from Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan

• Force Fields, by Martin Jay

• "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" by Louis Althusser

• The Inhuman, by Jean Francois Lyotard

4.) Finish the rest of wedding planning, including seating arrangements and all that jazz.
5.) Do my semester work
6.) Try to develop an idea for my master's thesis so I can do research in Rome
6.) Get married and go to Rome (my personal favorite to-dos)
7.) Come back and spend two months cramming for comp exams
8.) Take comps in the fall, do courses, and figure out my thesis
9.) Write my thesis next spring
10.) Get the M.A. and move on into the PhD

It actually does seem more manageable once I've written it out like that. The things I'm most concerned with are German and the comps, although finding an idea for my thesis is also a constant, nagging thought. I'm not particularly looking forward to the readings for Rome. If you'll notice, there is but one art-related reading, despite this technically being the "Art and Culture Seminar," and that one reading is Alberti, which means we're probably going to read the part about single-point perspective. Whoot. Meanwhile, I have to read freaking Lacan. I got an introduction to postmodernism from the library and I couldn't even understand the summary of his work! Even the Wikipedia entry was kind of confusing, and that's you know there's a problem.

Alright, I'm going to go read a book on Spanish art of the Golden Age...Jesus gave it to me junior year and I never opened it *guilty*

Near-Death Experiences and a Hatred of Fondant

I exaggerated the first part; I didn't know that it could have been a near-death experience till afterward, so that kind of limits the mind-numbing terror aspect, although there was still some of that. Basically, my brakes went out yesterday as I was parking at the PMA. I had to push them all the way to the floor and even then the car kind of coasted to a stop. Luckily, I found this out when there was no one in front of me, not on I-76 where I had been moments before. Since I was already at the museum, I went in, but I only stayed about an hour and a half because I was worried about rush hour traffic later. Stop-and-go is a bad game to play when you can't stop! Anyway, I made it home driving about 35 miles an hour on the highway, and despite one car being pulled over in my lane on Lincoln Drive, an extremely dangerous and curvy road with no shoulder, plus two people who thought they'd like to run across the street in front of me, I didn't kill myself or anyone else. Another bit of luck for me is that there's a mechanic's shop two blocks from my house, so I was able to drop it off and walk home. The mechanic's first words to me when he called back were "Miss, you're a very lucky young lady..." because apparently, my brake line had ruptured, and if I had kept driving any further I would shortly have had no brakes at all. So it's going to cost a couple of hundred dollars and I can't have my car until next week, but--again fortunately--I don't actually need my car until I go home next Friday. I have a library and a grocery store (and a liquor store!) within walking distance. I'm set.

As for fondant, I don't exaggerate there. I don't like it. I'm looking for a baker to do our wedding cake (translation: our wedding cupcakes, although I'm realizing that a real baker will probably refuse my Funfetti idea) and so many of the cakes they offer are just sculpted fondant. Yes, I know that it looks fabulous and you can do anything you want with it, but it seems like cheating somehow. I mean, it's just edible sugar clay, and I don't even particularly like the way it tastes. Of course you want people to admire the cake, but you also want it to look edible, not like it's a sculpture that might contain a tiny bit of cake at the center. I'd love for our cupcakes to have our initials on them, although I suppose I'd have to specify "M & S" so we don't wind up with "S & M" cupcakes. After all that just wouldn't fit the theme!

One-Fourteenth of the Way...

Or at least, that's how close I am to my PhD if you think of it as seven years. It could be longer, but I'm being optimistic. Anyway, I'm done with my first semester of grad school as of last night, and I got an A on my largest seminar project! No word yet on the other two; I just handed in one paper yesterday, and my other professor is doing our grades from Cairo.

Right now I'm attempting to make banana bread for the Christmas party this afternoon, and I was reminded of how annoying it is to try to bake for the first time in a kitchen that's not your own. I mean this is mine now, but I don't know where Phyllis keeps half the stuff, and I couldn't exactly call her at work to ask. For example, I could not for the life of me find the Pam spray. It's possible that she doesn't have it and uses lard or something instead--she's pretty old-school Italian when it comes to food. I'm sure she wouldn't approve that I used soy milk in the recipe, but that's the only milk I have, and I was not buying regular milk just for 1/4 cup. Hubbard had whole milk in the fridge the last time I was in New Haven, and I skipped Cheerios rather than come into contact with that. Once you've gotten used to the thinness of soy milk, regular milk seems freakishly thick.

Oh, apparently I haven't quite learned my lesson when it comes to what to expect from Dr. Hall--she was in her office yesterday, so I thought I'd ask her about the comprehensive exams for next fall and whether there's any kind of reading list that I could start thinking about. Her response was "No. In fact, don't read anything! Just look at all the pictures!" This was of course accompanied by her patented Cheshire cat grin. Sigh. The other girls and I are going to start a study group next semester. The way past classes have done it is that each person takes a professor and goes to them for an idea of what they're going to include in the exam, and then does research and compiles an image list, and then we combine them. Jasmine told me last night in the car that it's a good idea to choose a professor who's not in your area, so that you really research the crap out of it. For me, that would probably be modern/contemporary or 19th century (blech).

And if the seven-hour comps exam was not enough to look forward to, the prelims for the PhD are actually two days of exams, and then an oral exam. At least I have something to say back to Jen every time she reminds me that grad school cannot be that hard because I don't have to take the bar. Well, the bar is only one day, biotch! Alright, I'm not going to seriously contend that law school is easier than art history grad school; I'm pretty sure it's harder. They're very different, though--law school is all about memorizing laws and precedents, while grad school is all about forming new ideas and arguments.

Finally, as of last evening I'm the new treasurer for the grad student organization...whoot. Lol. Me, Agnes, Juliet, Nicole and some other girl I don't know who's in the Arts Administration program are the new officers. Juliet told us a very amusing tale of being in Harold Bloom's bedroom, completely stoned, last New Year's at a party thrown by his son, whose nickname is apparently "Bloomie." Harold Bloom, obviously, was not present. Anyway, all hail the new regime!

Because I Had To...

What do you get when you have an art historian arguing how easy it would have been for Palladio to make his tempietto into a mere copy of the Pantheon, which he considered the most perfect building of antiquity? Me + Microsoft Paint = awesome disastrousness! Yet, despite the obviously shoddy quality of my hypothetical panthietto, I am for some reason inordinately pleased with it, and will totally be including it in my presentation for tomorrow (and just imagine, you can really see how awkward an image it is when it's blown up on a five-foot screen!)

Ironically, making this altered version only cemented my appreciation for the actual building. When I started working on it, I thought the campanili or bell-towers looked incredibly awkward and out of place, but now I see that it would kind of be a boring building without them and without the lantern topping the dome. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out where he sourced the campanili from, but I do know he inspired someone else:


The tempietto was built around 1580; in the early 17th century, Carlo Maderno got the bright idea to stick little bell towers on the Pantheon, too, probably using Palladio's example. (Their existence is usually blamed on Bernini, but they weren't actually his doing.) The Romans immediately hated them and called them "asses' ears," and with typical Italian promptness they were torn down in the 19th century. Palladio would have had a heart attack and died to know that they defaced his favorite piece of architecture, especially if his work was used as the justification. Poor guy.

Behind the Times? Or, In Which I Don't See the Point of Twitter

Blogger is approaching its tenth anniversary, and I myself have been keeping this particular slice of the web warm for the past six and a half years. Now, though, blogs of all sorts are apparently being outperformed by Twitter, who was just approached by Facebook for a $500 million buyout (they declined). But I fail to see the point of a service that basically publishes a text message. What can you really say in 140 characters? Doesn't that just teach people to think and write in fragments, little shallow pools of ideas, instead of really delving into what they think about anything?

I can't even properly call myself old-fashioned in this opinion; I'm sure there are still plenty of diarists out there who scorn clacking away on a keyboard for the tried-and-true pen and paper method. I'm certainly not trying to be the 21st-century Samuel Pepys; a quick review of many past entries, especially in what we will call the "early years," reveals that a lot of what I've written down is stupid and trite and not very thought-through. Still, at least I have the option of writing at any length I so desire. I don't have to sum up my thoughts in haiku-length snippets.

Maybe I am just getting old after all. Damn kids! Get off my (metaphorical) lawn!

In Which I Learn to Be Careful With Puckish Profs

I had a meeting with Dr. Hall today to go over my paper, which I presented on Monday. Happily, she liked what I did and didn't think I needed to change anything, which led her to ask "So when can I have it?" and I, foolishly, responded, "When would you like it?" Her answer: "Well, now would be fine!" Er, this paper was technically due next Monday. Luckily there's a color printer in the lounge, and I happened to have my laptop with me with my final, fully spell-checked version. In the future I'll remember not to answer so quickly when she asks me a question...

However: two papers down, and my Palladio paper is not only fully written but a little too long...ironically, it's harder to write a 10-page paper than it is a 25.

Holiday

Yesterday, in an absurd coda to an otherwise lovely holiday weekend, I spent eight hours in the car trying to get from CT to Philadelphia, a trip that should normally take about three and a half to four hours. I spent four of those eight hours waiting to cross the Tappan Zee bridge. It took me four hours to get twelve miles. Unbelievable. Then my housemate calls, and I find out that she's two lanes over from me in the same gridlock. She said it was the worst traffic she'd ever seen, not counting her first Thanksgiving when it took her eight hours to get home. This was at 4pm, when I still had some hope of making it home before 7 or so. Ha, no. Eight hours it was. She got home an hour after me because she got off the road after the bridge to eat something, but I just couldn't bring myself to stop the car once I finally, FINALLY could go above one mile per hour.

Besides that, I had a great holiday! We went out for pizza with Sean's friends Wednesday night (Pepe's, naturally) and I met Santore's girlfriend, who was visiting with him from Florida. Thursday we went up to my aunt's for dinner and they wanted to know all about the wedding, so I showed them the inn, and the bridesmaid dresses, and my dress, etc. etc. Friday evening was our high school reunion, which was not particularly well-attended. They threw us in with the 10 year anniversary class, and the food (for which we paid $35) was Mexican food prepared by the cafeteria staff. I kid you not, make your own tacos! They even charged for water or soda, in addition to the crappy wine and margaritas. Nice, Northwest, very nice. Meanwhile, Sean's reunion gets catered by Lucibello's.

Anyway, the reunion was fine. No one had really changed much, appearance or otherwise. Oh, except Dan Luddy, who had six months' worth of beard after hiking the entire Appalachian trail! After a couple hours (and the strange feeling of wandering the halls of high school with a wineglass) people filtered out; most went to Black Bear, but a bunch of us went to the Cheesecake Factory instead, which turned out to be more fun than the reunion proper, I thought. Beside the four of us, it was Pace, Annie, Chris Swetckey, Andrew Stanton, and Tim O'Rourke, who I don't think I ever actually had a conversation with during high school. When we said good night it was weird to think that at least a couple of them I probably won't see for another five years, if I go to the ten year reunion at all (I really, really don't want to pay $35 for crappy Tex-Mex again, kthanxbai). Sean and I realized that at the ten year reunion, we will still be in graduate school, so it's not even like there would be anything to update anyone on!

Saturday Sara and I saw Twilight. Best/worst movie ever. It amused me highly and the Edward actor is delicious to look at, but these kids have got to be some of the most untalented actors I have ever seen. It was pretty ridiculous, especially considering that I heard they've been offered $15 million each for a sequel. You could find kids in a middle-school play evincing more complex emotions than the girl who played Bella. Also, this movie's message to tweens about relationships is seriously flawed, as I think just about every review has emphasized. Their attraction can be summed up as follows: She smells good plus he looks good equals a whole bunch of NEVER LEAVE ME EVER I AM NOTHING WITHOUT YOU IN MY LIIIIIIIIIIIIIFE. Jesus. And yet--will I see the second movie? Um, probably. He's really pretty. Sometimes, it's all you need.