kungfuramone

Ought Ten

2010-01-01T11:19:00.001-08:00

As everyone on the internet is busy flailing about with year and/or decade retrospectives...I am no exception. Only mine's shorter.

2000 - 2009: Graduated from college, played in fun bands, moved to PDX, worked in IT, got married, moved back to Eugene, got a MA, moved to Santa Cruz, did coursework, lived in France, knocked up my wife.

2009, specifically: Got back from France, worked on the dissertation, did trips to Oregon, TA'd French and then Russian history courses, taught two classes over the summer, pregnancy occurred, ran D+D games, house-sat in Bonny Doon, presented at a big conference, tried to and failed to get an academic job, had a nice holiday season.

New Year's Resolution: to have the fixings for bloody marys on hand most of the time. I think I can stick with this one.

P.S. Off With Their Heads is the best band I've discovered lately (thanks to my homie S.) They are awesome and you should listen to them.

It Makes Me Haaaaaaappy When Skies Are Gray

2009-12-27T15:50:00.000-08:00

I'll return to my normal format of a picture and a short caption per post shortly. In fact, I'm thinking of doing a week-long "these are a few of my favorite clothes" thing, following the massive success of 2007's week of sweaters. In turn, I'm inspired by the amazing cardigan B got me for Xmas this year (as I said on Facebook: the perfect gift for the future unemployed academic on your list.)

Here's the latest on my end:

My friend S hooked me up with a CD full of mp3s, which had been dumped off of a friend's computer such that there are no band / album labels. Based on my drive to the grocery stores and campus today, the tunes are great, and I wish more of this kind of thing went on among people I know. I was forced to figure out that my favorite stuff on the disc is by Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. (This is in keeping with my important traditions: I love indie variations on synthpop and I am at least five years behind on cool bands.)
It rained pretty hard yesterday. This was awesome except for the fact I had to drive my brother in-law back to San Jose airport, which involves going over Highway 17, which is scary as all hell at night in heavy rain. We both survived and he got home, so it's all okay.
B got me a bottle of Tanqueray for xmas, because she loves me and wants me to be happy.
I used Beauvoir's last (of the, like, six hundred she wrote) autobiography, Ceremonies des Adieux, to flesh out some stuff about Gorz and Sartre's relationship in the 1970s for Chapter 4 of the diss.
Lately, I've imagined myself roundhouse kicking all kinds of things as I walk past them. Not people, just cars and stacks of stuff at Trader Joe's and so on.
After the cardigan, the coolest gifts I got were the new CPU heat sink and the power supply for my computer (both from my in-laws.) They're incredibly quiet, rendering my desktop PC infinitely less aggravating to use for long periods of time, and probably saving my marriage.
I need to stop coveting clothes. But I'd still like some off-white slip-on Vans, because my blue ones have served me so well since I got 'em at the start of summer.

It's been a really nice Xmas break, but I miss all my friends. If any of my SC buddies are back in town, get in touch so we can drink beers and/or play Mario Kart and/or eat food and shoot the shit.

P.S. The title of this post only makes sense if you sing it like you were singing "you're my sunshine."

Have a Very Classy Christmas

2009-12-25T08:23:00.001-08:00

(Yes, I know it's a cheeseball pose...I'm just excited I finally have a good pic of the new suit. Courtesy of my lovely wife, who has lots of cute pics up on her flickr site right now.)

Happy xmas everybodies!

Introducing...Baby X

2009-12-22T11:07:00.001-08:00

(That's his or her foot.)

We had B's 20-week ultrasound yesterday. This is the one at which it's possible to identify the sex of the baby...usually. Ours, however, was not having it and had its legs crossed the whole time. We also learned that it is healthy and developing normally and that it has very long legs (given its German - English - Danish - Norwegian - Scottish heritage, this comes as no big surprise.)

In short: we have a stubborn, long-legged kid en route.

Wilford Brimley LIVES

2009-12-18T10:01:00.000-08:00

Pop quiz! When did Wilford Brimley die?

In 1965.
In 1988.
He is STILL ALIVE!

The answer, much to my shock, is #3! He is in a stupid-ass new romantic comedy with the shockingly butt-ugly Sarah Jessica Parker and the completely ridiculous Hugh Grant! See below:

Butt ugly.

Ridiculous.

Now THAT is about which I talk!

Last night, when B and I made this discovery before a rerun of Iron Chef, she started doing creepy seductive things to my leg pretending she was Wilford Brimley. Then she told me that Wilford Brimley was going to "Haul my Oats."

Incredibly Stupid Ideas

2009-12-16T15:23:00.001-08:00

I have these days during which I don't have to leave my apartment at all if I don't want to. Maybe 50% of the time, on days like that, I'll make up an errand, just to remind myself of why I don't ever want to leave the apartment in the first place.

Here are some incredibly stupid things in the world, inspired by my trip to Rite Aid.*

Jethro Tull: a rock band with a lead flute player.
Lowered trucks.
Music in stores.
Uggs with miniskirts in winter.**
Retail cards that don't give you a discount, but instead produce printed-out coupons with your receipt than expire within a week.
Cities designed with the idea that their inhabitants will get around everyday via a highway system.
File format incompatibility between different versions of the same program (see: .doc vs. .docx).
Road construction done in the mid-afternoon.
The fact that water has to be shut off for an entire apartment building instead of individual apartments in need of repairs.
Bad coffee sold at coffee shops.

* Having decided to boycott CVS permanently. In part because of item #5, above.
** A number of us were expressing incredulity lately that this still happens on campuses. What should have been a flash-in-pan trend has become an ongoing sartorial phenomenon of Satan.

College Without Students

2009-12-13T15:09:00.000-08:00

I'm in the bunker on a beautiful rainy winter afternoon. Earlier, I dropped off some books at the library and soaked up one of the best things about the yuletide season: a college campus without any students on it. Campuses are beautiful places when there aren't any undergraduates stinking them up.

Last night was the third meeting of the UC to the SC Attractive Historians 2009 - 2010. This one was held in honor of our friends and colleagues N + M, both of whom got one year older this year. Also, I stole a pic off my homie J's Facebook:

He shares my great love of plaid shirts (and of awesome sweaters, great hats, and jeans that fit properly.) This was us doing one of our J-Crew poses.

On tap for the week to come: doing a registry for the (our) baby showers of ought-ten, ongoing teeth-pulling good times working on the dissertation, and entreaties to the sky gods for the continuation of soggy weather.

P.S. One of my favorite annual online events if the Onion AV Club's "Year in Band Names." While I am fully cognizant of its terrible taste, I am nonetheless delighted by "Magic Johnson and his Aides."

Rejected

2009-12-11T08:03:00.000-08:00

The academic rejections have been coming in hot and heavy lately. I got a particularly stinging one this morning, because when you have something peer-reviewed and your "peers" don't like it, you get to read exactly why.

How do I feel about all of this? I'll leave it to Murray to explain:

It's Been a Long Five and a Half Years

2009-12-08T14:08:00.000-08:00

With the Yuletide season all up on's, I have been cast into a reflective frame of mind of late. B's now 4.5 months along the pregnancy process and my degree is due to be finished inside of six months. Big life decisions are upon us.

Of all my immediate academic friends (I'm thinking of both those friends and colleagues I know from my cohort at the UO who continued on as well as my friends here at the UC to the SC), I am the first to be finishing the degree. This is turning out to be a very big mixed blessing; I'm jumping off the sinking ship just the financial situation completely falls apart (good), but I'm also completing a dissertation with significant gaps (bad). As I completed research and writing this term, and as I worked with some other dissertators in a reading group, I found out about whole areas I needed to read about, new documents I needed to look at, and most importantly, major themes I needed to introduce in the text itself. I still have a lot to get done.

I'm also the first person among my core group of friends who has witnessed just how grim the academic job market really is. I applied to ten tenure-track jobs, most of which were on the eastern seaboard. I am competing for those jobs with literally every other European history PhD who graduated this year, as well as those from past years who were still looking for work. I will be the first to say that I am a dapper dresser and a good drinking buddy, but those are some long odds to get a job.

The process isn't over yet, so I don't want to get ahead of myself, but for now, I'm feeling very relieved and sort of "peaceful."* I've always said that I just wanted to finish the degree, that I wasn't sure that I was really cut out for the kind of competition and desperation inherent to an academic career. Now, confronted with the realities of the job market, I'm being forced to put my money (side note: what money?) where my mouth is.

* Normally, I only feel this way with the aid of prescription painkillers.

The Irony of the Horns

2009-12-05T11:18:00.000-08:00

Here is a picture of me singing "we're not gonna take it" at this karaoke night.

The videos are still in production, apparently, but soon I should be able to link to vids of my performance, that of my homie J, and (again, apparently) some kind of dancing situation going down.

Right now, it strikes me that the point is the lack of irony involved in doing something like singing 80s hits. I remember that, years ago when the world was young, my friends and I did things out of an ironic sense of what was funny (disco, metal, "world's sexiest grampa" t-shirts.) The iconic thing was throwing the horns - at the time we started doing it, the memory of bad late 80s / early 90s hair metal was still fresh, and it was funny for punk kids to do it.

In our thirties, I find we all have a more complicated relationship with irony now. I mean, yes, I still dress like this, but I'm kind of sincere about the dapper old man look. When I play Yoshi's Island, it's because it is an excellent video game. And when I throw the horns, I mean it.

Here's How it Works

2009-12-02T12:02:00.001-08:00

It's the start of December, which is a special, magical time in the life of aspiring historians. Hiring committees have to send out their interview notices before the start of the winter break. Every day is a fresh check of the inbox, to the sound of giggling elves and dancing fruit of some kind (I am kind of free-associating here, so bear with me.) Here's how it works:

You, the would-be academic, wrap up six years of work in an application package (CV, letter, letters of recommendation, sometimes a statement of teaching philosophy) and send it off to places that are hiring.
Somewhere between 50 - 299 other aspiring academics do the same thing for the same jobs at the same places.
If you make it past the first round of cuts, you get an e-mail that yes, you lucky dumpling, you get to have a preliminary interview at the annual American Historical Assocation meeting. You put on your new 260 dollar suit (or the equivalent) and head on down there.
You have something like 20 minutes to explain your entire life's work. You may or may not be asked to submit a chapter or two of your dissertation
If you make it past that round of cuts, you are definitely asked for samples of your dissertation. Then, off you go to Panhandle State University itself, for the fabled Job Talk. You give a 30-something minute presentation of your most polished and emotionally moving research and writing. You field hostile questions from the entire department. Two other candidates do the same thing, although most places have enough discretion to schedule their talks on different days.
If you make it past that round of cuts, you get the job. Then you're an assistant professor of history. Then you have six years to do everything in the world to be eligible for tenure.

Sound like fun? It's never too late to go to grad school!

(If anyone's wondering, I'm way back between steps 2 and 3: waiting to see if I made it past the first round of cuts anywhere.)

How to Install a Car Stereo when Your Old One Breaks

2009-11-28T16:25:00.000-08:00

The short way: you go to some horrible store and have some guy do it for money.

The longer way: you buy it online and then install it with your father in-law over the course of about three hours in his garage.

B's dad was an engineer for a big corporate entity for many years. He's in the process of building his second plane from the ground up since retiring. The man knows his way around mechanics, electronics, and combinations thereof. Thus, when we need something fixed that isn't a computer*, we go to him.

It turns out that installing and wiring a car stereo isn't that difficult. It's supposed to be based on standard wiring, in which each color wire corresponds to something specific - yellow is always supposed to be the power, black is the ground, etc. The thing is, the '96 Geo Prizm** has its own made-up colors for wiring. So B's dad looked 'em up online. Then, whoever it was that installed our old stereo introduced a middle tier of wiring between the car end and the stereo end. The result, as indicated in the above diagram we generated over about 45 minutes of tracing wires, was general obfuscation.

That said, after a lot of clipping and snipping and splicing, we got the thing hooked up. We fired it up and it worked on the first try. A party of triumph ensued! This morning, B and I picked up a 7-dollar hot pink cable so we can connect our iPods to it. And now, for the first time in months, we have tunes in our car.

Around my apartment, this counts as big news.

* I can still fix those.

** It is a sexy car.

Baby is Nigh

2009-11-25T15:50:00.001-08:00

Per B, I was to wait for her blog post before I did mine, and she found a few moments this morning, so here I go...

To everyone who doesn't already know: we are having a kid. Here are the FAQs and their respective answers:

It is due in early May.
Yes, we are going to find out what sex it is. That will happen late Dec. / early Jan.
Yes, we will tell everyone what sex it is once we know.
B's doing well. While the chance of her being laid off for the next budget year is all too high, she's got the job and the concomitant health insurance until after the kiddo is born, so she's getting excellent pre-natal care.
We're doing the midwife thing and will probably have a doula as well. Look that up if you don't know what it is.
Both of us have our H1N1 shots, finally. They were not easy to come by.
I guess it goes without saying that this was thoroughly planned. We're the kind of people who thoroughly plan, like, dinners for a week in advance, so we certainly planned having a baby.
Yes, I am excited.
Yes, I am also completely terrified (and yes, this dramatically increases the pressure on the job hunt.)
B is kind of hoping for a boy, I am hoping for a girl, but we're both cool with whatever happens.

That's all I can think of at the moment. Happy turkey day to everyone; I'll try to blog more often and with more creative / semi-interesting content when I get back from the in-laws'.

Got Me a Suit

2009-11-23T17:05:00.001-08:00

I am the proud new owner of a charcoal gray two-button suit from Zara in San Francisco. It was fiendishly expensive by graduate student standards, but quite cheap by nice suit standards (about 250 bucks.) Thanks to the intervention of our homie S, I was also able to buy a really nice white dress shirt for about 30 bucks. I'm still determined to make some of my existing skinny vintage ties work with this ensemble for academic job interviews.

I was going to do a superbad internet fashion show, featuring videos of me hanging out with Tim Gunn, but I am too beat to do so at this time. I will do it soon, though.

The Best Season / Wherefore Art Thou, Gallows Humor

2009-11-20T10:01:00.000-08:00

Part I: Let us join together in celebration of this, the best part of the year. November is the very heart of autumn, and as such, it features the maximum chance of true sweater weather. I'm finally not uncomfortably hot as I go about my quotidian rounds. Today, in fact, is supposed to feature a few drops of rain for the first time in weeks and the last time for weeks, so I'm in a better mood than usual.

Of course, the real cause for better moods than usual is that Thanksgiving is imminent. Both of the long-term readers of this blog know how I feel about Thanksgiving: it is the best holiday. Let's review why:

Not a holiday for teenagers to scream woooooo!
No fireworks.
No need to worry about presents.
Wine + tryptophan = sleepy.
STUFFING.*

Last year I managed two Thanksgiving celebrations, one in Paris and the other in Heidelberg. This year I get two yet again, one in San Francisco and one in Novato. Both will be staffed with friends and family and feature awesome stuffing.

Part II: It's been hard to keep up my sense of humor through all of the stress of job apps and future plans. ** It's just...not that funny. I spent the last five years telling myself that it was okay if this whole academic gig didn't work out, but now that I'm at the end of the degree, I would really like a job, please, and preferably one involving teaching history. That said, I am determined to find something funny about it. I'll be sure to let everyone know when I find it.

* Some people call it "dressing." My current theory is that it's stuffing in the bird and/or oven, then becomes dressing once it's on the plate. Or it's just one of those weird American English regional words, like soda / coke / pop. Anyway, I call it stuffing.

** I did make it past the first round of cuts at one of the places I applied to. Hope springs eternal.

Unequivocal

2009-11-18T15:53:00.000-08:00

Before, regarding the UC protests, I was equivocal. It is, in fact, one of the most pernicious aspects of the neoliberal (i.e. right-wing) shift of the last twenty-odd years that both the federal and state governments have gutted public education. It is, in fact, a bad, bad thing that fees and tuition go up by huge amounts each year even as jobs are slashed, class sizes expand, and so on. But: when you and your scruffy undergrad allies prevent people from coming and going to their jobs and classes, the only people who suffer are precisely the people you claim to represent.

After spending two hours in the car today to pick B up for her doctor appointment, which she missed, eventually getting waived through by some idiot 20 year-old at the west entrance only after he and his idiot friends conferred about whether I was legit, I am officially writing off the protest culture around here as a BUNCH OF FUCKING MORONS.

--end transmission--

Microfilm, PDFs

2009-11-18T11:29:00.001-08:00

One of the big problems with writing a dissertation about a journalist is that he wrote a lot of articles. Yesterday I managed to crack a problem that had been hanging me up; I figured out how to download almost all of his articles from the 1960s from an online archive of the major journal he worked for. It's a tedious process, as I have to look through the sommaires one-by-one and then go after the specific pages I need, but it works. The strays are on microfilm, and I've summoned them from the one library in the UC that has them. If I had figured these things out a year ago, I could have done this while I was sitting around in my apartment in France instead of watching Vin Diesel movies on Chinese pirate sites. But then I wouldn't have watched so many Vin Diesel movies, which would be a major loss.

This part of the writing is a real slog. But I'm determined to have a finished draft by somewhere around mid-January, job prospects or no job prospects.

The Things I Hate: A Short New List

2009-11-15T11:43:00.001-08:00

When I can't drink any more coffee, because I'm too wired.
When I can't drink any more wine, because I'm too drunk.
When I can't eat any more cheese, because I'm too full.
When I can't write any more diss, because I'm too lazy.
When I can't stay in the apartment, because I'm too bored.
When I can't behave like I'm 22, because I'm too old.
When I can't stay in bed, because it's too late.

You get the picture.

I Sum Me Up

2009-11-13T13:13:00.000-08:00

Each of the following pictures describes 50% of me. Combined, I am complete.

Notes:

The bunny is not Pesto, but another bunny with a pancake on its head. Pesto just turned seven, though, which is awesome. The bottom picture is, of course, Wendy O. Williams of the Plastmatics and Lemmy of Motorhead. I have the mp3 of them performing "stand by your man" together, which is even more awesome than one would think. I wish I had the 7", so I could put it up on the wall somewhere (like, the bunker.)

"Indian" Food

2009-11-11T14:49:00.000-08:00

On Sunday evening, homie A joined B + I to meet homies L + B, down from Salem for a long weekend. B is getting his PhD in American history at Davis. He was part of the gang at UO when I was getting my master's. His lovely wife is an architect. When they come down to Cali to check in with B's adviser(s), we line up some fooding, usually in the middle-ground of Berkeley.

We ended up at Ajanta, north of the UCB campus. The food was really good and really interesting; it broke with the usual fare that constitutes "Indian" food in Indian restaurants in the US, with the standard red curry for every dish at varying degrees of heat. Instead, there were a bunch of interesting proteins and veggies (scallops, lamb, these great little veggie ball things) in different kinds of curries that were more brown in color and complex in flavor than most of the standard-issue red curries I've had.

It made me think about what a misnomer the term "Indian food" is, anyway. It would be like having a restaurant that specialized in "European food." Ajanta had each dish listed along with its region of origin, which was neat. It was still a pan-south-Asian approach, but at least it gestured at the fact that there is no unified Indian food any more than there was a unified India before the Brits finished taking over in the mid-19th century.

In conclusion, I'd like to note that I would happily eat naan with every single meal.

Opaque

2009-11-10T12:45:00.000-08:00

Dissertation update time.

I'm in a dissertation reading group this term, sharing duties with three of my fellow UC to the SC history dissertators. One is writing on tourism in China in the early 20th century, one on hydrology in San Diego around the turn of the century, and one on Yellow Fever in New Orleans in the mid-19th century.

We talk about phrasing and organization, we call attention to the little grammar flubs everyone succumbs too once in a while, we discuss framing and argumentation. But the bottom line is that I understand all of their stuff just fine, despite not knowing a damn thing about Late Qing China, water management, or epidemiology. The background assumptions implicit in their respective works are evident to any reasonably well-educated person.

The same cannot, apparently, be said for the background assumptions in my work. For some reason, intellectual history is inherently more difficult for other historians to grasp than are other sub-fields (with the possible exception of economic history.) I write as clearly as possible and I try to announce the issues in the literature. I call attention to context and try to explain the nuances of postwar French history. I do my part for The Cause. All of it still leaves my friends and colleagues fairly baffled.

The problem is, I think that every intellectual historians finds him- or herself justifying the whole enterprise, arguing that in fact the history of ideas in context is a legitimate pursuit within the larger field. Yes, it strays across disciplinary boundaries, but after all these years, isn't that supposed to be (at least in part) a good thing? If I can be in conversation with philosophers and literary scholars, how is that a problem?

There is also the question of how much context is enough vs. how much is too much. If I copy out an entire textbook worth of fun facts about French political, social, and cultural history from 1945 - 2007, I don't think I will be doing my readers any favors, since the point of my project is Andre Gorz, his life and (especially) his thought. I guess I still haven't cracked the code on making this kind of thing transparent to people who aren't already interested in it, but it still begs the question: why is intellectual history more esoteric than other kinds of history?

Anyway, on the up side, I had a good meeting with the adviser yesterday, who suggested I take a thematic approach to Gorz's journalism, since there's just too much to summarize in an interesting way. This means that I'm on track with my finishing plans, at which point I can safely devote all of my energies to finding that barrista job in Fresno, Bakersfield, or Redding.

First to Show, Last to Go

2009-11-08T01:30:00.000-08:00

Tonight was accidentally triumphant. Let me break it down for you.

It turns out the bowling alley / karaoke bar wasn't accepting any new songs after 7pm (!) because a live band was showing up to play background music to further would-be karaoke rockstars after 9pm. That's Item A.

Item B: a couple of sunburned scumbag Santa Cruz derelicts got in a serious fistfight at about 8:30pm in the bar, about eight feet from all of us. The little fucker in the orange shirt with the stupid mustache knocked the other guy out in the street, which we all watched in a state of "well, we live here, I suppose" disbelief. They didn't even bother and kick the winner out of the bar for the rest of the night - he ended up doing a perfectly respectable "sweet child of mine" with the band.

Item C: the important thing is that J, the birthday boy, got to do his song (that one Green Day song about being neurotic on the radio while making money) and that I got to mine: We're Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister. J being the salt-of-the-earth kind of guy he is managed to line it up with the karaoke jockey and it all came together. He: rocked it. I: also did some damage.

Anyway, I was there at 7pm, we closed the bar down after 1am, and now I'm home watching some terrible music video I had on a homemade DVD (I think it's...Rancid? Perchance?) and letting Pesto run around. I'm having some water. Good night.

Sideburns of Festivity '09!!!

2009-11-06T09:04:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow features the second outing of the UC to the SC Attractive Historians 2009 - 2010. On tap? Karaoke, karaoke, and the concomitant mixture of triumph and degradation. As Social Czar, how do I prepare? By crafting my meager facial hair into Sideburns of Festivity!!! Check it:

Profile 1: Impassive.

Profile 2: Pensive.

La Visage Meme: Delighted to see you. Available for babysitting.

I'd welcome suggestions as to what I should sing tomorrow, as I want to move beyond Billy Idol or Monkees songs (my mainstays.) Think 80s, think limited vocal range.

Walk Down the Street at Night

2009-11-04T10:48:00.000-08:00

This happened to me within two blocks of my apartment at about 6:45pm:

Crazy sweating guy literally ran up behind me and spent four minutes shouting at me about how the full moon brought about bad spirits and strong emotions. This ended with him shouting "do you know about YAHWEH?!" as I used a Jedi mind trick to escape.
Toothless guy shouting at me out of his car, then blocking traffic and demanding directions to "the McDonald's on 17th." I told him which direction to go (i.e. away from me.)
Guy stumbling past, dragging his leg behind him like a zombie in a 70s grindhouse flick. At this point I was laughing out loud, but fortunately he didn't notice.

Later, as I was describing this to my (new) homie N, he interjected "and then someone takes all your money!" I realized, though, that this isn't the problem - I'm never worried that someone wants to rob me here. I just think someone will eventually stab me just because. This state is in the process of breaking off and sliding into the sea.

These days, living in Santa Cruz, I feel like Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver. Happily, I am not armed.

Nature: It Still Exists, Apparently

2009-11-02T19:35:00.000-08:00

This weekend B and I went to Yosemite. It's about 4.5 hours from SC via a whole mess of highways that cut through the south and east bay. We realized on returning today that it's almost a straight shot across California west - east; you start at the Pacific Ocean (four blocks from our apartment) and end up within spitting distance of Nevada (imagine a gross spitting noise at this point in the paragraph.)

Yosemite was very nice. The weather, while banal and stupid in the context of civilization, was welcome in the context of big rocks and meadows - 70 degrees and sunny the whole time. We stayed at the Yosemite Lodge, which has not had updated decor since c. 1988, and got to see all of the essential pretty stuff the park is known for. We also added to our collection of funny cheesy magnets from tourist sites: "Speeding Kills Bears."

I have only two points to make. First, it was nice not being in SC during Halloween, a holiday normally celebrated here by a flurry of stabbings three blocks from our apartment. This time, the cops cleverly spent the evening literally annoying gang members all night (this strikes me as brilliant policing strategy; I would help shut down the local ACLU if it meant the cops could spend every day doing this.) Second, I got kind of choked-up and nostalgic on arriving in the park and seeing how beautiful the Merced River is. I hate that I never get to spend any time in actual natural settings living in California. Nature here is just squared-off little blocks of scrub surrounded on all sides by concrete. I miss the real stuff.