pretty young things.

“The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction—to locate what is true…Beauty is a starting place for education.” < Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

study habits.

The setting:
Comprehensive exams are in two weeks. I am about 50 books and a hundred miles away from being done with studying.

The dialogue:
Well-Meaning Friend: Hey Julia. How're things? How are you doing with comps studying?

Me: Not so great. I have so much to do! I really need to buckle down. I'm planning to just do nothing but study for the next two weeks.

WMF: Oh, too bad! So we won't see you [at our mutual friend's party] on Friday?

Me: Oh, no, I'll be there!

WMF: So you're buckling down after Friday, then?

Me: Yeah, pretty much. After Monday, actually. I have tickets to a play!

WMF: Right.

because they hate to be lied to, but like to lie...

"Because they hate to be lied to, but like to lie, they love to find things with the help of truth, but hate to be found out by it. But this is the revenge truth takes on those men unwilling to be found out by it: It not only finds out the truth about them but prevents them from finding it out. To this, even this, is the human mind reduced, to this blind, weak state, that it wants to hide its foul vileness from others, but wants nothing hidden from it." > St. Augustine, Confessions

i am woman, hear me...gchat.

J: i'm confused about whether my [male] friends are "boys" or "men."

A: are you similarly confused as to whether you are a girl or a woman?

J: yes, similarly. i could be either. but at 26, woman seems more appropriate.

A: i'm not confused, but its hard to change the terminology. we are women. they are men. but it's hard to start saying that.

J: sounds so...official! i am a woman. i need to practice saying that.

A: haha. and roaring.

J: hahaha

social scientists, funny dudes.

A friend (who does quantitative political science) walks into the grad lounge. I am the only person present. In greeting, he says to me:

"Julia, I'm always happy to see you, but what I really need right now is someone who can explain multi-nomial logit to me."

how i found out about osama.

Drunk guy yelling outside my apartment last night: "Kill Bin Laden! Kill Bin Llllladen! Kill Kill Kill!"

Annoyed neighbor: "He's already dead! SHUT UP!"

Me: Shit, really?!

persecution and the art of klosterman.

Over copious amounts of booze and food last night, I had a discussion with one of my professors and some fellow grad students about the state of our discipline. This is a topic we all love to discuss. And we do it ad nauseam, because we all predictably think that our discipline is underrepresented, under-appreciated and, at the extreme, persecuted. I assume this phenomenon is not restricted to my discipline--I'm willing to bet most PhD students feel like their specialty is under-appreciated, regardless of their area of study. That's probably just what happens when you devote yourself to some highly specialized body of knowledge.

Anyway, the conversation turned to the intersection between literature and politics--particularly the politics of Richard Russo's novels, which I happen to love. Some participants in the conversation were not convinced that novels were the most effective way to address questions of political theory. The academy, they suggested, was the most effective place to raise these questions. My very insightful addition to the conversation was that there is (and this is an exact quote): "more than one way to skin a cat."

This morning, as I was reliving the nights events, trying to remember whether I had embarrassed myself, I realized that had I been drunker (and let's all be thankful that I wasn't) I would have followed this statement with an elaborate exposition of my love for Chuck Klosterman, whose book, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, I've been reading in my (technically non-existent) spare time. Chuck, I firmly believe, is the poor man's Tocqueville (the rich man's Tocqueville being, of course, David Brooks). Klosterman's book, which is aptly titled, has fascinating things to say about a myriad of otherwise under-analyzed subjects--things like cereal, porn, John Cusack films and Guns n' Roses cover bands--which I'm convinced a lower-middle class latter day Tocqueville would have adored. If only I was as funny as Klosterman, I might actually have a chance of making a living thinking about this stuff too.

My favorite part of the book so far is a series of 23 questions that Klosterman insists he has to ask anyone before he can figure out whether he can love them. I've tested out a few of these questions already, and no one has given me a truly satisfactory answer yet. Here are two of my favorite, for your careful rumination and enjoyment:

9. A novel titled Interior Mirror is released to mammoth commercial success (despite middling reviews). However, a curious social trend emerges: Though no one can prove a direct scientific link, it appears that almost 30 percent of the people who read this book immediately become homosexual. Many of these new found homosexuals credit the book for helping them reach this conclusion about their orientation, despite the fact that Interior Mirror is ostensibly a crime novel with no homoerotic content (and was written by a straight man). Would this phenomenon increase (or decrease) the likelihood of you reading this book?

17. You are sitting in an empty bar (in a town you’ve never before visited), drinking Bacardi with a soft-spoken acquaintance you barely know. After an hour, a third individual walks into the tavern and sits by himself, and you ask your acquaintance who the new man is. “Be careful of that guy,” you are told. “He is a man with a past.” A few minutes later, a fourth person enters the bar; he also sits alone. You ask your acquaintance who this new individual is. “Be careful of that guy, too,” he says. “He is a man with no past.” Which of these two people do you trust less?

dead white men.

In the midst of a discussion about Tocqueville and colonialism:

Me: I'm worried that I'm just turning into an apologist for everything dead white men have done. I'm pretty much just a dead white man.

White Male Friend: Except for the dead part, I'm really OK with that.

on embarrassment.

A couple years ago, I gave up on embarrassment. I can't remember what served as the catalyst exactly, but I do remember realizing one day how tired I was of being embarrassed. It was, for years, the emotion I was most frightened of--avoiding embarrassment, and by extension, humiliation, was primarily what I dedicated myself to during both high school and college. This may seem like an excellent idea--avoiding embarrassment and humiliation--but you have no idea how boring it was. Think about it: most fun things in life are potentially embarrassing. I avoided all of those things.

The problem, you see, is that along with a fear of embarrassment comes an extremely well-developed sense of pride. Shame, unlike embarrassment, has very little to do with pride; shame has to do with feeling guilty about actual bad behavior. Embarrassment, on the other hand, is just about ego. When you have a very well-developed sense of pride, almost everything is embarrassing--mostly because it's all in your head. It's exhausting, really, because you're constantly on the look-out for the possibility of losing face, when in reality you're obsessing about minutiae that no one in the world sees but you. It's extremely tedious, let me tell you. So, a few years ago, I quit embarrassment. This was just around the time I started this blog, I think, which was also around the time I decided to apply to grad school. Not at all coincidental, I would say.

Why I am bringing this up now? Well, I was at a grad school dinner a few weeks ago where a visiting professor told us (in the midst of making introductions) that his favorite thing to do with his students on the first day of class is to ask them to tell everyone one fact about them no one would know, and one embarrassing story about themselves. Picture it, if you will: this suggestion is made to a handful of graduate students (mostly male) and a handful of middle-aged professors (all male) and someone then says, of course, "Julia, please, why don't you start us off?"

If there was ever a time to be embarrassed, this would have been the moment. And it was embarrassing, but not for the reason you would think. The problem was not that I was asked to start, since, having given up embarrassment, I no longer care that much about telling personal stories to a table full of professors and colleagues. No, the embarrassing part was that I couldn't think of any embarrassing stories. I've got stories, sure--I was mugged at gunpoint once, there was a time when I fainted in an elevator, and I fell into the lake in Central Park when I was little--but none of those stories struck me as really embarrassing. Fainting and getting wet just don't count, as far as I'm concerned, and everyone just gets nervous when I bring up the mugging story. In any case, I just blanked! At the time, I actually considered making something up, but I'm not that good a liar.

Being embarrassed about not having anything to be embarrassed about is a strange payback for a life of pride, I think. Probably serves me right, though.

there she ain't!

Four (true) scenarios:

1: I run into a friend in the hall. He says "there she is!" in response to my greeting.

2: A professor, upon entering a room in which I am the only person present says, "there she is!" in response to my greeting.

3: Another friend enters the grad student lounge. Despite the fact that there are four other women present, he says "there she is!" in response to my greeting.

4: Sitting at a table in the library, I see yet another friend approaching. I wave. And guess--just guess--what he says in response: "there she is!"

Very good, dudes. Here I goddamn am. What is with you all these days, anyway?

the people we used to be.

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget." > Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook

the gender gap.

Yesterday, my new glasses arrived in the mail. I picked them out a couple weeks ago, when I was in New York visiting my family. After opening the package, my first thought was that there had been a mistake, because these glasses were way more hipster than I remembered. My second thought, on realizing that I had not in fact been sent the wrong pair of glasses, was that I couldn't imagine my mother actually allowed me to purchase them. After spending the whole morning wearing them, however, I think I remember why I picked them. The moral of this story: change is hard, especially when it messes with your face.

Also, I had coffee this morning with three of my closest male grad school friends. I was wearing my new glasses, feeling all self-consciously hipster, waiting for what I thought would be the inevitable snide/disingenuous comments. The result: not one of them said anything about my new glasses, despite the fact that two out of the three of them walked right past me without recognizing me.

Men are so strange.