west of the moon

We still know how to do this.

It's been difficult, these last few months, reading the webjournals of friends who are doing this "fifty new recipes in 2006" thing.  Janet and Julia and Peter are making posole and moroccan spaghetti squash and chocolate meringues and arugula pesto and bourbon bread pudding, and Matt and I?  We're kind of calling it an enormous success if we manage to do a chicken spice-rub and saute some spinach.  (Strange as it may seem, one of our cooking standbys is the spicy barbecue rub from Thisbe Nissen's The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook.  That book is a tiny gem of engaging anecdotes and attractive graphic design.  I've only ever cooked three or four things out of it, and it doesn't look like something you'd expect to be a functional cookbook, but it is!  The spice rub is fantastic, but I've learned to use about half the paprika and chile powder it suggests.  Mix the spices, coat the chicken, toss it on the Foreman grill, open a bag of spinach and saute that with a little sliced garlic, poof, complete dinner in ten or fifteen minutes.  I resisted the pre-washed pre-cut bagged spinach for a while, but got over it.  It's generally good quality, it's not that much more expensive, and it doesn't have tiny bits of grit in it like the fresh spinach inevitably does no matter how much I wash it.)

Anyway.  I've been so buried in the dissertation, and Matt's got a lot of stuff going on, and while we've been managing to cook, we've been just rotating through our relatively small repertoire of familiar recipes.  We branch out occasionally.  At some point last week I hit a snag in the writing process, just could not figure out how to work through a particular tangle in my argument, so I dug up my old recipe for beef stew and spent an hour or so chopping onions and browning meat and dicing carrots, and by the time I hit the "cook over low heat for 4-5 hours" stage I had untangled what I needed to, so that was perfect.  Last month, on one of our "oh, god, I have no idea what to cook, can't we just make pasta or something?" nights, we had the brilliant idea of sauteeing some shrimp with garlic and tossing that into the pasta sauce, thus transforming the fallback pasta-cooking night into a tasty shrimp linguini night.  But that's really about as ambitious as we've been able to manage.

Where I'm going with this: today is Matt's birthday (yay!) and we decided to do a special dinner thing last night, to celebrate.  (I'd been looking forward to this all week, actually.  You wouldn't think it would feel so special to cook a nice dinner with someone I see every day, but I'm a sucker for a special event.)  It was a masterpiece of logistical manuevering, because we have a teeny-tiny kitchen, but it came off perfectly. 

1) Pepper-crusted filet mignon.  (Recipe from a recent Cook's Illustrated.)  Take whole black peppercorns, crack them (by rolling over them with the underside of a bowl or skillet), simmer them in olive oil for about seven minutes.  Let that cool to room temperature, add kosher salt, stir to mix.  Coat two filets in this mixture, wrap them in plastic wrap, let sit at room temperature for an hour.  Then heat some more olive oil in a skillet, brown the filets (three or four minutes on each side), transfer them to a heated baking sheet and cook in a pre-heated oven for another four minutes.  Take them out of the oven, let them sit for about five minutes (on a wire cooling rack, covered loosely with aluminum foil). 

2) Broccoli.  Take a couple of heads of broccoli, cut them up into smallish pieces.  Heat some olive oil in a wok, toss in a whole bunch of sliced garlic, cook the garlic until it's a little sizzly but not quite browning yet.  Throw in the broccoli, toss it thoroughly in the garlic and oil, keep cooking (stirring pretty near constantly) until it's bright green and you don't see any obviously uncooked bits.  Pour in a little bit of chicken broth, second-guess yourself, pour in a little bit more.  Cover the wok and let it all cook for a while longer, stirring occasionally, until it looks done.  (A more objective test, I guess, is "until you can stick a fork into the broccoli stem pieces without too much effort."  But we cook broccoli like this all the time, it's a recipe derived in equal parts from my mother and Mark Bittman, and by now I can pretty much just eyeball it.)  Once you've got the broccoli on your plate, you may want to add a little salt and a little lemon juice.

3) Biscuits.  And here I'm going to just come out and say that I am in no way ashamed of the fact that we use those Pillsbury "Perfect Portions" biscuits.  I've made biscuits from scratch, I've made biscuits from Bisquick, and I actually prefer the Pillsbury.  So there.

The food turned out perfect, absolutely perfect.  We had flowers on the table, this cheerful spring bouquet with crocuses and alstroemeria and a big easter lily, and phenomenal wine (Villa Mt Eden Grand Reserve Zinfandel).  And it's nice to know that even in the middle of this mad impending-graduation rush, I haven't forgotten how to do things like cook a nice dinner or set an attractive table. 

radio silence.

Sorry for not posting--the dissertation and I are having some quality alone time.  I hope to rejoin society soon, but cannot give real estimates.

oh, Berkeley.

Friday night, stopping at the video store to pick up a movie, it felt like Berkeley itself was on display.  Two kids, I'd guess around eight and ten years old, wearing hand-knit fringed ponchos in ugly earthy colors, were running around the store backwards with their arms stretched out.  Their mother browsed the "Independent Cinema: Staff Picks" display and apologized to some (but not all) of the people her children crashed into.  A man and a woman in matching Tevas and bright-yellow ski jackets wandered aimlessly around the store in big loops, which would have been fine, except that they had a very large dog in tow, and the very large dog kept knocking DVD cases off of shelves with his very large tail. 

When the couple with the dog finally made their approach to the checkout counter (where no one seemed to have any idea how to queue effectively), the wagging of the very large tail almost knocked over a young child (whose mother was pleading for access to the employees-only bathroom, on the grounds that the young child in question was potty training and if they couldn't get her to a toilet ASAP they'd undo several weeks of positive reinforcement work), and that was apparently the cue they needed to get the dog out of the store.  The man left with the dog and the woman stayed to finish renting their selected movie, but the man (or maybe the dog) set off their car alarm, and when I was finally done in the video store (about five minutes later) the man and the woman both were sitting in their car, flipping through the owner's manual, while the lights flashed and the horn beeped and the dog ran barking back and forth across the backseat.

it lives! (UPDATED: It does not live!)

I don't think it's going to surprise anyone who knows me to know that I'm extremely attached to my computer.  All of my different types of work and most of my play depend on the computer.  It's a big responsibility for such a small machine, and I try to show my appreciation.  Every week I back up my files and clean up the desktop and update the software, especially because I appear to have persistent bad luck where computers are concerned. 

(My first Apple laptop was an iBook had about a two-year lifespan.  In that time I had to replace the video cable and some parts of the keyboard, and the case cracked in a couple of places that appeared unrelated to normal wear-and-tear.  When the computer finally died, it died dramatically, with a failing logic board and some other minor (but expensive) malfunction.  I replaced it with this PowerBook, which is less than a year and a half old but is already on its third hard drive.  My pre-Apple computers, all Windows and Linux machines, didn't have hardware problems but did have recurrent software problems that my computer-genius friends could only describe as "unusual".)

My experience with Apple to date has gone something like this: my much-beloved computer develops some problem.  I take the computer to the Apple store.  The people at the Apple store take my computer away from me for days at a time and charge me several hundred dollars.  Later, I get the computer back, and it works, but I don't feel particularly good about the whole exchange.

Today?  Today was different.  I took the computer to the Apple store, and the people there fixed it.  Right there in the store, without needing to send it to Tennessee (like they did last time).  I didn't lose any data and I didn't spend any money, and I am so happy that it's almost like Christmas all over again.

(UPDATE: This was all very premature.  What looked like a solution was really just a temporary easing of symptoms.  Major internal components need to be replaced, and I'll be working on Matt's old laptop again for at least a few days.  Sigh.)

posthumanism and the body.

Someone (hi!) asked me in email whether my rant about posthumanism and the rejection of the body was in any way similar to Elizabeth Bear's recent journal posting on the subject, and I told her that I'd try and answer here on the weblog, if I had time.  And, well, I had other things I was planning on doing tonight, but my computer is dying.  AGAIN.  All pixellated-screen and unresponsive to commands.   I'm bringing the hateful thing in to the Apple store tomorrow morning, so that I can pay them unreasonable amounts of money for them to make it work, AGAIN.  And praying that I won't lose any data.  My last backup was Saturday, so it's not that much work lost, but I had a good writing day today and the idea of losing that (did I mention that I'm two months away from my filing deadline?) actually makes me feel sick to my stomach.  I can't even think about it.  But I've still got Matt's old laptop to play around with, and a little while before the Project Runway finale starts, and a desperate need to distract myself.

So, for context.  I've been assigned four pieces in the upcoming Encyclopedia of Women in Fantasy and Science Fiction.   Three of them are short biographical-type essays (Laura Quilter, Shawna McCarthy, and "Professional Editors"), and one is a slightly longer piece on posthumanism.  When I was discussing possible topics with the editor, I mentioned that I'd love to do the posthumanism essay because it would give me a chance to write about how posthumanism seems to be predicated on a rejection of the body, which I've been wanting an excuse to write about for a while now.  And it's the weirdest thing, but despite being a regular reader of Bear's webjournal, I somehow missed the post where she brought up the same thing.  I'm guessing that I was just in one of those busy phases where I only skim the journals and blogs?  But I've read it now, and read all the comments, and it's both eerie and reassuring to see other people expressing the exact same thoughts I have on the subject.  (Is this what it's like to be part of a zeitgeist?)

There's a persistent theme in science fiction, the idea that in the future we'll all be able to leave our bodies behind and move on to some other type of existence.  Not only that, but that leaving the body behind is an unequivocally positive goal.  God knows I've had times in my life where I found this an appealing idea--I went through long phases in my life where I was happy to think of my body as the inconvenient consequence of having to move my brain around from place to place.  People refer to this sometimes as the brain-in-a-jar fantasy, or Cartesian dualism gone wild, and both characterizations capture something of the truth. 

One of the major breakthroughs in mental philosophy was the understanding that the mind lives in the brain; the major breakthrough that follows that is understanding that the brain lives in the body.  It's not just that I don't want to upload my mind to a computer matrix, it's that in many ways the idea doesn't make sense to me.  How can you separate the neural process from the physical inputs?  If I don't have enough protein in my breakfast, I have trouble paying attention to my work in mid-morning.  My body's ability to process lactose is highly dependent on my emotional state.  And this is even before we get into the complicated psychosomatic nature of tension headaches.  The mind and body don't just occupy the same space, they exist in a complex state of interrelationship.

It's not that I don't enjoy fiction that deals with uploading human consciousness to computers.  Greg Egan and Charlie Stross have both done some beautiful work with it.  (I'll admit I'm partial to Egan's Ndoli Jewel stories, because they involve a computer brain that has grown up inside the human body, alongside the human brain.)   It's just that I find the concept troubling.  But it's late now, many hours and many interruptions after I first started this post, and the body that houses the brain that houses my mind is tired, and I'm going to wait until tomorrow (or later) to cover Part Two. 

found objects.

Making the rounds of weblogs and webjournals this morning, I kept trying to care about that feminism/happiness study (discussed blandly at Slate and much less blandly by Ms McCarron), but I can't do it.  People with complicated goals are disappointed more often than people with simple goals!  Film at eleven!  Sorry.  I'm more interested in the yeti lobster than I am in this study.

Actually, that's not much of a put-down, since the yeti lobster (Kiwa hirsuta) is pretty impressive.  One of my clearest childhood memories is of a school field trip to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, where we sat through a long presentation on newly-discovered undersea life.  Much of the visual content of the presentation was uninspiring (we saw a lot of video of worms, I think) but they did a great job of explaining to us just how remarkable it was to find animal life around deep-sea sulfur vents.  Living creatures at incredible depth and pressures, breathing sulfur gas!  The impression of the deep sea as a place stranger than alien planets was a lasting one, and only reinforced by later visits to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.  (Anglerfish!  Fangtooth!  Hagfish!  Dinner plate jellyfish!)   The yeti lobster apparently has no eyes, so I'm holding out hope that the claw-fur is some kind of sensory apparatus. 

 

The State of the Susan.

It's not a bad time for a general check-in, I think, given how sporadic my posting has been.

• The Graduate Program: is almost over.  I'm graduating in May, and my dissertation progress is pretty much right on track.  I'm going to have to keep working pretty hard between now and May (my filing deadline is 19 May, but I'll need to have a mostly-finished manuscript a little in advance of that, to make sure my advisors have a chance to read it over), but not so hard that I can't take partial weekends and the like.  The good news is that the dissertation isn't just close to being done, it's also pretty good.  The more I work on it, the more convinced I am that my argument is interesting and worthwhile.  That's a good feeling.
• Other Academic Work: it somehow manages to not just be all dissertation all the time!  I've just agreed to write a few articles for the Encyclopedia of Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy, a project that will probably take up most of my summer but I also expect to be very rewarding.  I'm doing a couple of biographical entries, but I'll also be writing an essay on feminism and posthumanism.  (Any of you who've ever had to sit through my ranting about how posthumanist fiction is predicated on a rejection of the body, you've already heard the rough outline of this essay.) 
• Strange Horizons: The magazine is doing really well!  We restructured the reviews department a while back, and I'm thrilled with the result.  (I'm also thrilled with what all the other departments are up to, but those aren't new, so they don't get singled out quite the same way.)  A lot of the fiction we published last year is being reprinted in the various (and rapidly proliferating) Year's Best collections, proving to me that I'm not the only person who thinks our fiction is stellar.  (Oh, and you have just a few days left to vote in the 2005 Reader's Choice awards, so go vote.) 
• The Weblog:  I'm sure it hasn't escaped your notice, Gentle Reader, that I continue to have an ambivalent relationship with weblogs and the internet.  At this point, my major concern is the time issue.  (See previous point re: dissertation.)  I've got a small army of things I want to write about, and very limited time for doing the writing.  But I'm giving it a real try.  I've imported some posts and comments from the most recent incarnation of this site, and I have a long-range plan to put at least portions of my eight-plus years of online journalling archives back online, but that's pretty much at the very bottom of my priority list.  Sorry. 
• The Home Office: My houseplants are still alive, though perhaps not thriving the way they did in my last apartment.  (The last apartment was much sunnier.)  I keep trying to get back into a regular yoga routine, but am blocked in this attempt by the fact that our apartment lacks any open space large enough for me to run through the sun salutations without worrying about whacking my hand on a piece of furniture.  Matt and I are getting back into a routine of cooking dinners together (rather than getting take-out) and I'm really happy about that.  And now that I have a better handle on my work, I'm feeling much less reclusive than I was six months ago, and seeing more of my friends. 

Things are good, overall.  Now I have to get back to work.

turnabout.

Last night I had a dream that it was mid-semester and I had completely forgotten to attend one of my classes.  But this wasn't your standard student-anxiety dream!  The class I'd forgotten was one that I was teaching.

morning in the library.

Settling in for another day in the Education library.  Today I'm starting on the vast quantity of books I ordered from off-site storage (Northern Regional Library Facility, or NRLF).  I explain to the student working the desk that I have books from NRLF waiting, but that there are probably twenty or thirty of them, and that I really don't need them all at once.  "Just pick five, it doesn't matter which." 

She takes my card and heads back to find my books.  There are two other staffers hanging out behind the desk.  One of them is holding a copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the other is waving his hands around in excitement.  "It's awesome!  But then the ending is, like, I don't know how to explain it.  But every one of his novels I've ever read is like that, it's just awesome, awesome, awesome, and then" [he gently smacks his own head] "what just happened?  Like you're being dropped off a cliff or something.  But seriously, it's still cool even when it doesn't make any sense.  Seriously, Philip K. Dick is one of my favorite authors, you're going to love that book."  The girl holding the book (dangling from her hand, marking a page with a finger) looks skeptical.

The first woman comes back with my books, and watching her check them out distracts me from my eavesdropping.  These are older books, mostly--that's how things end up in NRLF most of the time-- and some of them haven't been checked out in years.  They've all got barcodes, but they don't all have return-by date slips in the back.  Some of them have little pockets glued to the back cover, where date cards used to go, and one of them has a blue slip with an old-fashioned looking typeface, "University of California General Library, Return to desk from which borrowed", and the dates stamped underneath it range from February 1948 to October 1959.  And now May 2006--am I really the first person to read this book since 1959?  I suppose I might be.  It's a bound reprint of a 1933 doctoral dissertation from the University of Pennsylvania, A comparative study of state teachers college faculties and liberal arts college faculties.  Odds are that it isn't that useful to me, but it popped up on the catalog search and I thought, why not?  You really never know what will end up being useful.  That's why I have twenty or thirty more of these waiting for me behind that desk.

I've lost the thread of the Philip K Dick conversation, and anyway I've run out of excuses to stand and listen, what with my books being checked out and ready to go.  All I hear as I'm gathering them up is "...like cyberpunk, you know, he was one of the first big influences.  That's all about, like, technology and the future and it's all cynical and dark..."

earthquake!

Earthquakes plural, actually.  Two in a row, right on our own Hayward fault line.  (The San Andreas gets all the publicity, I know, but the Hayward is the one I'm more interested.  Not only is the UC Berkeley campus directly on top of this fault line (our football stadium is described as being bisected, goal post to goal post, by the Hayward fault), but seismologists consider it a "prime candidate" for a big quake in the next couple of decades. 

Today, though, as I sat buried in the Education/Psychology library, tucked away at one of the nasty steel desks along the back wall (the only reliable place to find power outlets for my computer, but also a big dead zone for wireless internet, and I know this is going to sound strange, but the metal of the desktops and edges hurts my skin whenever I come in contact with it, like little sparks or slivers or something), we had a couple of small-but-noticeable earthquakes.  The first one (magnitude 2.3, epicenter two miles to my west) felt like a big truck going by, a little bit of ground rumbling.  The second one (magnitude 3.4, epicenter four miles away) felt like someone had kicked my desk really hard.  Matt says that all the stuff on our shelves at home jumped around, but nothing fell, so that's good.  That's what I like in my earthquakes, a little bit of excitement but no actual damage.