Porto-able blogging

Sorry for the bad pun.

I hope this works; I'm trying to post to my blog from e-mail for the first time ever!

I'm in Porto, and my optimism about having internet at the hotel was dashed to smithereens when we arrived and the rates were 20 euros a day to connect wirelessly. Why, at an otherwise luxurious hotel that offers every amenity, must they charge an arm and a leg for the most important thing? I know, I know. The answer is that precisely *because* it is important, travelers will generally pay an arm and a leg.

But, I'll have you know, I have written at least three full-length entries that are at the moment stored on my computer, and as soon as I have internet again I'll upload them.

At the moment, I'm sitting at a row of computers set up at the congress of the European Socialists, which is taking place at the huge Alfandega building, which used to be the customs house. When I arrived about an hour ago, after an afternoon at the contemporary art museum, I was told that Howard Dean is here! Hopefully I'll get to meet him and bubble incoherently about being a Vermonter, etc. The whole set-up for the congress is immense, and I joined M in watching a series of speeches in the big main hall. Everything is bannered in red, red being the color of the socialists, and there are hundreds of politicians and assistants milling about everywhere you look. Even though M tells me most have left by now.

[Picture added at a later date. Would be too techno-fancy to send photos to my blog.]

In a short while, we're headed to a reception at one of the port wine bodegas, and so we'll get to taste more of the nice port that we've been imbibing over the week. Just now, in the room of booths related to the city, NGOs, and socialism in general, we had a taste of a reserve wine, made here, that gave me that almost meaty warmth in the back of the throat that tells me I have just had a truly good wine.

Well, I'll send this and see if it really appears on my blog. And then, maybe tomorrow if I come back with my computer and we get the password, I can post the other entries that were written on the trip. Sorry that all the chronologies will be messed up. You'll just have to exercise your mental reversal capacity, as if you are watching that movie where everything happens backwards.

O Porto

I am sitting in our hotel suite (they ran out of regular rooms and so had to give us this one…what a pity!) at the Sheraton in Porto, surveying the buffeting winds and pouring rain, wondering if I’ll even venture out today. Perhaps I’ll catch a bus and go to the big contemporary art museum, where at least I’ll be dry.

Besides, yesterday and Tuesday evening I had plenty of time to explore the old city, and enjoyed it very much. In fact, I think I walked for something like seven hours yesterday! It’s a gorgeous city, built on steep hills overlooking the Douro river. All of the different areas I poked my nose into had their own charm, and the buildings everywhere you look are covered in the characteristic blue painted tiles, or colored with glowing yellows and ochres.



It is quite clean, and peaceful, and full of churches and palaces that suddenly appear when you top one of those long hills. The metro (really a tram) is fast and modern, and we’ve been able to get from the hotel to downtown pretty easily with it. From any vantage point in the old city, you can look over to the other bank of the river, where all of the port makers have their bodegas, with signs prominently displayed on the hills, lit up at night.

There’s a big, graceful bridge that crosses from one side to the other. I haven’t been over to that side, but I’m sure it’s possible to visit the wine cellars and yesterday I nearly went to the Port Wine Museum, but went to the photography museum instead. We’ve had port in several places, which is such a lovely, sweet and mellow wine. We also are liking the local “green wine,” which is a dry white wine that is perfect with all the seafood.

The photography museum was cool, in part because I was literally the only person in there besides a group of schoolkids. It’s in an immense, mostly empty palace, and on the ground floor was an exhibition of photographs made in the 1880s by expeditioners who traveled the entire coast of South America and even up to California, with their nineteenth-century butterfly nets and penchant for collection. There’s also a large library (also entirely empty), and on the top floor, an exhibit of hundreds and hundreds of cameras, from the earliest to novelty cameras of the 70s and 80s. The best thing was the view from up there; I had a great vantage point from which to see across the city towards the cathedral, and even the bridge.



Another cool place was the Lello bookstore with a beautiful interior and a fabulous staircase right in the middle. The exterior is amazing as well, done in a sort of art-deco white and gray.



It’s been surprisingly difficult to find places to eat, because while there are tons of cafés and bars and pastry shops, it seems that all the restaurants are congregated in one area, lining the river. So for lack of any insider knowledge about other places to go, we’ve ended up there for several of our meals, and they’ve been consistently tasty. Yummy local olives, salt cod, sardines, a sort of musky cheese, and other fish. Tuesday night M had a fish called “robalinho,” which was baked in a coating of salt and was unbelievably tender and delicious. Last night we dined on “seafood rice,” a sort of paella, at the Majestic Café, a nineteenth-century café in the grand style (probably built by the British port investors; many of the port brands have English-sounding names), covered in mirrors and gilt curlicues. The food prices in general have been cheaper than Barcelona and definitely cheaper than Brussels, although they tend to charge you for food that they bring in the beginning that you think is free, like olives, bread, and tuna paté.

Last night there was an Arsenal-Porto soccer match, which explained the presence of tons of burly British people that we had noticed the previous evening at the restaurant. What with the soccer game, and a five-day weekend holiday in Spain, the tourists seem to be predominantly British and Spanish, although I imagine there are consistently a lot of Spanish visitors. Most of the people we’ve talked to, waiters, etc., seem to speak Spanish, although as M pointed out it’s sort of a pity to expect them to be able to speak Spanish, since the reverse would certainly not be true. The doorman at the hotel told me there's also a big horse jumping event, and what with the two socialist congresses, and another conference, the traffic has been snarled like crazy.

That, so far, has been our visit here in Porto! We have the rest of today and then tomorrow, and Saturday we fly out at 6 am. Today M switched from one congress to another (they deliberately put them back-to-back, profiting from the fact that everyone was already here), and it looks like he’ll have less time today to join me for meals and wandering around the city. Tomorrow hopefully he’ll have some free time.

[Note: Instead of M joining me, I got to join him for a trip to one of the port wine bodegas, Taylor's. It was an immense and beautifully appointed place, and they bussed hundreds of socialist politicians there, across the river and through the narrow streets of Vila Nova de Gaia, to enjoy a massive spread of food, wine, and of course, port. Plus several local singing groups, called tunas, made up of either boys or girls with guitars and beautiful harmonies. A very lovely evening, and I guess I owe my thanks to the European taxpayers.]

Stuffing

M’s friends had been asking for a Thanksgiving dinner for a while, and so after M got back from his trip to South America, we decided we had to do it. The clincher for me was when I found the cranberries: a Thanksgiving meal wouldn’t have seemed very thanksgivingy without it, and even just seeing those cheerful bouncy berries made me want to build a tableful of food around them.

I spent the whole day of the dinner party cooking, and shopping for a few cooking/serving items, as our kitchen at the moment, while supplemented with the wedding gifts I was able to bring over, consists of exactly six each of forks, plates, and glasses, and seven people were going to be eating. So I bought some extra wine glasses and back-up paper plates, plus a pie plate and rolling pin to make the pie, and two serving dishes, which were necessary if I wasn’t going to serve the meal out of pots and plastic bowls.

I had a schedule that planned out every single minute of the day, starting at 8:00 in the morning! Of course, several of the key recipes were coming out of the yellow Gourmet, with the addition of my mom’s cranberry-apple-pear relish, a back-of-the-box cornbread recipe that I had hung onto, and the green beans with almonds that didn’t really need a recipe. The difficult bit was sorting out what I would serve in lieu of turkey; I finally hit upon stuffing the stuffing into eggplants instead of the turkey, which although it involved juggling a couple of different recipes and hoping they would come out all right in different formats, was a smashing success.

Now, keep in mind that the guests were all Spaniards and Catalans, and the American-style Thanksgiving plate disrupts some of their firmly held notions about how a meal should be eaten. Namely, that one should not combine multiple courses onto one plate, and that one should never combine sweet and savory items, especially fruit-based items, which should be reserved for the fruit course after the main course.

Nevertheless, everybody was game and wanted to know about all of the various things they would be eating, until they got tired of explanations and wanted to dig in instead. Cranberries are difficult to explain; as far as I can figure there’s not even a translation for them in Spanish or Catalan. The word that is evidently used in American movies for cranberries actually refers to blueberries, and also a sweet, soft red berry that is picked in the mountains that sounds like it has little to do with cranberries.

Anyway, here is a photo, and a description of the menu:



Hors d’oeuvres (entirely purchased…I couldn’t have been that ambitious): rosemary crackers and mini toasts with an assortment of cheeses, three varieties of hummous, and a quartet of tapenades, as well as olives.

Cornbread with honey butter: Like I said, a back-of-the-box recipe. Buying the cornmeal was a little bit uncertain, because here it’s all labeled for polenta, with various cooking times. I opted for quick-cooking polenta meal, and it seemed to work well. This is not a familiar kind of bread in Spain, which is why I made it, and everyone was so intrigued by it, they ate it all up.

Cranberry-apple-pear sauce: This is the sauce that my family will devour gallons of around Thanksgiving and Christmas time. Just the right balance of sweet and tart. Plus, it’s just so darn pretty! Also very enthusiastic reviews from this group.

Green beans with roasted almonds: The name says it all. This was the least popular of the dishes, judging by what people left on their plates. Probably because the beans were just tender, still crisp, and my experience with vegetables in Spain is generally that they are boiled within an inch of their lives. Also, I added some lemon juice, and I think next time I would go for a different flavor, maybe thyme or rosemary, or just plain garlic.

Buttermilk mashed potatoes with caramelized shallots: What would Thanksgiving be without mashed potatoes? Yum.

Stuffed eggplants: This was the trickiest recipe, especially since I was sort of making it up as I went along. First, I halved and roasted the eggplants until I could gouge out the insides. Then, I made the “Classic herbed stuffing” recipe from the Gourmet, with the addition of sautéeing the cubed eggplant insides along with the onion, celery, herbs and bread (and I added carrot). Then, after the stuffing was done and cooled, I jammed it into the cavities of the eggplants, and roasted them again for about a half hour before dinner time. They were super delicious, very Thanksgiving in flavor, with a nice presentation. The only thing I might change next time is to put a bit of broth in the bottom of the pan, so that the bottoms of the eggplants don’t dry out, which they did a tiny bit.

Apple pie: I used an all-butter pie crust recipe I found online from Bon Apetit magazine, and the apple pie recipe from the Gourmet. Sooooo good! I was nervous about the crust, since I had never made one just with butter, and there are dire warnings about melting the butter with your hands or overworking the dough, so I was constantly shoving the butter and the dough in its various stages back into the fridge (the kitchen was broiling, what with all the cooking). But it turned out beautifully, melt-in-the-mouth and crisp on the outside. I totally botched rolling out the bottom crust, because it stuck everywhere when I tried to transfer it, but I just sort of patted it into the pie plate, and since it was the bottom it didn’t matter. When I did the top crust, I worked faster and it turned out fine. The filling was a combination of granny smith and gala apples, which was a good mix, just the right level of sweet/tart mixed with the lemon juice and zest, sugar, spices and flour. With the guests, a total hit, and when M and I got to share the last slice the next day, I think it tasted even better.



So there you have it, my first solo flight for a Thanksgiving supper.

En route

I’m on a train somewhere in Belgium or France (in these days of the Schengen agreement it’s hard to tell when you pass from one to the other), and I’m contemplating how pleasant this mode of travel is. Compared to a plane, there is so much leg room, the windows are so big, and there’s a big fold-out table in front of me, on which my computer can comfortably sit. We are on our way to Porto, and our Air France ticket includes a leg on the train from Brussels to Paris. This seems like a good way to do things, and we’ll have to keep it in mind for the future. It was less of a hassle to hop on the metro and then hop on the train bound for Charles de Gaulle (and hour and a half) than to the normal process of getting the bus, then the airport train (a half hour), then stand in line at the airport….

I’m also thinking, as I watch the eternally gray sky, green fields, and tidy villages roll by, with my reflected face superimposed on the scene like a pensive ghost, what a horrible place—or perfect place, depending on how you see it—Belgium was to have a war. The never-ending damp, the depressing gray, the mud up to the waists of the men in the trenches—this is either a sadistically awful or gruesomely appropriate setting for war.

Reading Paul Fussel’s The Great War and Modern Memory last year, I got a chilling sense of the utterly debased way that modern warfare was practiced. After the cheerful flags waved them over the English Channel, the poor boys sat in mud next to the decaying corpses and bits and pieces of flesh of their comrades. Fussel’s whole point, and that of many critics who have followed him, is the impact of such an experience on our general cultural fabric, how much our collective memory is shaped by such horror.

But looking at these serene green fields, I wonder how much we have forgotten, as well. Belgium is no longer the symbolic victim of Teutonic rape; it is Europe’s capital, known for chocolate and beer. It’s hard to imagine the scenes of the Great War happening here. Sadly for us, however, we have new, even more horrific images of war and destruction from around the world to replace the old ones.

It is ironic in some ways that my thesis has a lot to do with how we respond to war and the images we make of it. Ironic, because my own experience of war is limited to the televised and sanitized versions in the media, and perhaps that one day in Washington, September 11, 2001… And also because I hate war, am by nature pacifist, and have more unresolved questions than answers about the interaction of such a technological and brutal exercise with the rarified world of poetry. But my antipathy toward and limited experience of war is also somewhat appropriate, because as my area of study is literature, my concern is precisely with representations of war. How was the Spanish Civil War written about and pictured both by those who were there and those who were not? For many in the late 30s, Spain was something like what Iraq or Darfur is to us now, a distant reality, filtered by representations even if our concern is pressing.

Anyway, this wasn’t really what I meant to write about at all while shuttling across the fields of northern Europe in a high-speed train, but there it is. On this trip, I have brought my computer along in hopes of getting some work done, so that also means I will be able to blog from time to time.

And that means you’ll hear about my impressions of Porto, and Portugal. I’ve never been to Portugal before; although in 1999 I was on my way there with two girlfriends during term break from Oxford, when we aborted that plan and on a whim headed to Algeciras and then Ceuta instead (the only time I’ve set foot on the African continent).

Making up for the missed opportunity, I plan to enjoy lots of seafood and drink port and maybe absorb a little Portuguese. Anyway, I’ll be sure to write again in the near future, and post this entry as soon as I find an internet connection.

Editor’s Note: I was obviously far too hasty in my optimism about internet connection.

Your invisible friend

No, I didn't get tangled in the fake christmas tree's wiry branches, I just have been going nonstop the last few days. It seems like my life lately is alternating between long, quiet stretches of slothful "getting work done" (aka blogging and/or cooking), and manic periods usually involving travel to other countries in which we cram in as many possible meetings and family activities as possible.

This recent spate of activity involved having a Thanksgiving dinner party for a group of friends from M's work, and then flying to Barcelona to show the apartment to possible renters, sign the rental contract with our new renter (hurray! she wanted to move in right away!), shop for Christmas and birthday presents, have a mini birthday party for our niece who turns four on Tuesday, get a haircut (now have bangs, am still undecided), meet with the contractor, and take an excursion to a 6,000 year-old mine. I'll explain more later; but for now I'll say that the mine thing was cool because I didn't know that our neolithic ancestors even knew how to find minerals underground, much less make jewelry out of them, and here they were hanging out in Catalonia and digging several hundred football-fields' worth of underground tunnels to dig out precious metals with their stone axes.

We flew back this morning, and I went directly to French class to take an exam, and in a bit I'm headed out again for a Christmas party at the home of M's boss. It promises to be a fun evening, and we're doing an exchange of gifts called the "amic invisible": invisible friend, where you get a present but never find out who it's from.

I'll let you know what I get, but I can't let you know what I gave, because you never know who might be reading...

And I promise to tell you about the Thanksgiving that I made, the first that I have ever made on my own and away from home. It got rave critical reviews, albeit from people who had never had a Thanksgiving dinner in their lives.

Tag line courtesy of Martha Stewart

Good Things:

M arrived safely home on Saturday morning, and we spent a quiet weekend at home.

We put up our Christmas tree! Our plastic, 15.99, comes-in-a-box Christmas tree! But you know, it's still magic the moment you switch off all the lights and let the tree twinkle and glow.



I have now figured out how to upload pictures to the blog, if that mess of code that just appeared above these words means a picture will appear when I click "publish."

I saw the sun today for the first time in a long time.

And, just now, at the grocery store I found gold: a bag of cranberries! It was sort of tossed into the corner, and it was the only bag that I could see anywhere, but I snatched it like it was the holy grail. Now I can go make some cranberry sauce.

At least my hand wasn't cut off

The following is, unedited, what I scribbled down the other morning after waking up:

dream about losing glasses--
unfamiliar university campus
sewage end, Luke Skywalker-like
Many many bl & red glasses
but none were mine.
Snuck into library (which was sewage plant)

Though it might pass for avant-garde poetry, it's not really my style and I wouldn't want to read this all printed up pretty in a book.

Instead, these are, as it were, cliff's notes to my dream of that night's sleep. I shall interpret the cliff's notes, and then you shall help me interpret the dream, OK? Sorry about the memory-holes. Happens with dreams.

So, in the dream, I was with my brother Dan visiting (purposes unknown) a huge university campus. We toured the library and looked at the reams and reams of books (some stuff happened there that I can't remember), exited via a metal gangplank thingy towards idyllic green grass just as they were closing, then drove around in a rattly stick-shift looking for some sort of event (can't remember what it was). As it was getting dark, I realized that I had lost my glasses, my new black-and-red glasses. Maybe I left them in the library?

I went back to where we had parked the car, a strangely European-like tiled plaza, and drove around convinced that I was going to break the car. Couldn't find the library. Found myself on a huge hill at dusk with wide-laned roads that overlooked the city, but I couldn't see the library. I asked a student-like guy (cargo pants, sticky-up hair), who hopped in the car, and instead of driving me there, drove to find another student, a girl (busty, sorority-type), whom he then convinced to drive me to the library.

When we got there, it was dark and not just closed, but boarded up and covered in plastic sheeting. The girl took off. I pried open the plastic and plywood and jiggled a door on the gangplank part until I got into a sort of entryway. Then, there was someone coming! I tried to hide, but he saw me. It was a janitor, but he turned out to be friendly. He led me through windy windy passageways and up some stairs into a series of plush offices (wait, is this reeeally a library?), where he rummaged in a drawer and pulled out a pair of glasses.

Yes! Those are mine! Delirious with joy, I grabbed them, and then...realized they weren't mine. They were little kiddy plastic sunglasses with red frames. He proceeded to pull out black and red glasses of every shape and size, but none were mine. He told me I could look around, and disappeared, so I roamed the library-that-wasn't-a-library, and then stuff happened that I can't remember, but I didn't find the glasses, and suddenly I fell through a trap door into some sort of trash chute and things started getting sinister.

I was flushed out the back end of the library into a bay, and there was trash and noxious green stuff, so I knew, intrepid investigator that I had become, that the library was up to no good and that the EPA should be notified. I was hanging tenuously onto a piece of the trash chute that closely resembled the scene in Star Wars where, after his hand is cut off, Luke is dangling on a skinny antenna-thing at the bottom of the trash chute and by telepathy gets Lea and Hans to come pick him up in the Millenium Falcon.

My brother came to pick me up, and that's the last thing I remember from the dream. I guess I never got the glasses back.

Now you come in. Does this dream:
1. Represent my anxiety about working on my sewage-like PhD while very far from my home university/library and maybe never finishing ever?
2. Indicate that deep down I think I would look better in different color glasses?
3. Show how during the 80s my brother and I were into Star Wars?

Choose one, or fill in the blank:
4. Other _______________.
I'll be eager to hear what you think.

It was a black crayon

In French class on Wednesday, our teacher actually grabbed my notebook and held it up for all to see, exclaiming that THIS (pointing at my homework, written in obsessively neat lines and paragraphs, with space for her to write corrections, and without any crossouts or scribbles) is how everyone should write out their devoirs.

I wavered, in the space of those thirty seconds, back and forth from giddy pride at how well I had done (at writing on lined paper--yes, we are reverting to second grade, aren't we?) to sheer embarrassment at being the goody two-shoes in the room. Then relief when she handed it back, then more embarrassment when another student grabbed it and my notebook was passed around the room (more, I think, to copy study my answers than to admire the straight lines of writing). Grown-up students are just as inclined as kids, it seems, to not doing homework and then copying it or scrambling to do it at the last second (even after class has started). This is a practice that annoys me to no end. I did my homework, why do you get to freeload off of me? Now I am being a goody two-shoes.

(Note: After a brief search, I just discovered that the phrase "goody two-shoes" comes from a "rather twee" 1765 children's book. The main character, named Goody, only has one shoe, is given a new pair, and then acts all show-offy about it. Source. Ain't the internet grand?)

Speaking of classroom embarrassment, I am reminded of a time in first or second grade when I raised my hand to say that I couldn't find my crayon (our teacher had passed them out for us to work with). Everyone laughed at me, because I had somehow twisted the crayon up into my hair and then forgotten about it. They, meanwhile, could plainly see it hanging there in my white-blond hair. I had evidently been doing the "very very shy + absentminded girl with long hair twisty around finger (+ crayon, in this case)" thing: this was a long-lasting epoch of my life. I was mortified.

You know, I didn't even remember that I remembered that. But there it is. And so, the lesson that I learn from this brief detour into memory lane is that, although I was embarrassed the other day, nothing can compare with the mortification of a shy childhood when one twists one's crayon into one's hair.

No turkey for me not to eat

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

It's not very thanksgivingy around here since this country does not generally celebrate the holiday, and I'm just here by my lonesome today, but I plan on calling my family in medias res (where "res" = turkey-baking), and I got to talk to M in Honduras via a very wobbly skype connection. This weekend when he gets home (after he finishes up with the--and these are direct quotes of today's agenda items--"lunch with the central American ambassadors" and "meeting with the president of the congress") I'll cook up stuffing or some such in order to reprise the holiday on a smaller scale.

And anyway, when I was in Vermont on Halloween, my mom and my sister and sister-in-law and I made a thanksgiving dinner, so that I could have a taste, albeit while trick-or-treaters were ringing the doorbell and grabbing fistfuls of candy, or, if they were little enough, standing stock-still in wonder that you were actually offering them mountains of gleaming sugar-bombs. For them to take. And then eat. And their parents were letting them, in fact, urging them on. My little nephew, cutest of said little trick-or-treaters, in a leopard costume, got the hang of it after only a few houses despite the tender age of fifteen months. They catch on quick, those kids. Especially when it involves candy.

Looky here, I've gotten on a tangent about an entirely different holiday than the one I started with. Back to thanksgiving. But I guess if you think about it, it's not hugely different than halloween. It's like putting all the candy on the nice tablecloth and the special china and then eating it all at once, to show how thankful you are for the abundance of candy in your life. And I am, to be sure, very thankful for all the candy. Even when I wish we could spread it around the world more fairly, so everyone could have their very own stash.

Here are some of the other things I am thankful for, in no particular order:
(Not such an original list idea on thanksgiving day, but unoriginality will not stop me oh no it won't. Also, my dad usually makes us go around the table and say what we're especially thankful for this year, so here's my contribution from afar. And since it's on my blog, I get to say as many things as I feel like.)

1. Babies. My friends and family keep having them, and I am loving those babies, and wish I could get to know every single one of them. This fall alone, five girlfriends have had babies, or are going to have them very shortly. I feel lucky when I get to spend time with the babies, like the week with cute nephew in October, or weekends in Barcelona with cute nieces, or getting to know a friend's little boy when we were the only Vermonters of our acquaintance to be living in the boondocks of Indiana. Keep them coming! (My sister is pregnant, so she's doing a good job. And the baby is due on my birthday!)

Here's a weird but true fact: In the past two years (well, maybe my memory doesn't go back that far accurately, but at least in the last year) ALL of our American friends and family have had boys. ALL of our European friends and family have had girls. Coincidence? I think not so.

2. This is related to the babies. I'm thankful for the people who are making those babies, i.e., friends and family. And even people who aren't making babies at the moment, or aren't making them any more (i.e. our parents). I know that wherever we are living in the world, it is a beautiful thing to have the love and support of friends, and the love and support of family. Those people who know you inside and out, and so when you describe something in an e-mail or on the phone or online, they can imagine you doing it or thinking it. Because they already know.

3. Being married. These past almost-five months have been so incredibly great, and I feel blessed not only to have found the sweetest and smartest man ever, but, by God's grace, to have married him to boot. And after so long of living an ocean and substantial amounts of solid landmass apart, it is so cheering and lovely to see him every day, and share our lives even more deeply. Even when one of us departs for a trip, the good news is that we always get to come home to each other. Also, this year I am thankful for our wedding day. That it was beautiful and home-spun, and sunny and simple and singing and sweet. When I want to feel happy, all I have to do is think about the details of that day, and how I married the man I love, and how the people I love were there to send us off into weddedness. (Have I used enough superlatives, with a dash of alliteration, in this paragraph?)

4. Technology. OK, that's sort of a geeky and surprising thing to say after all the hearts and flowers of the previous paragraph, but what I mean by it is that technology makes it possible for this whole living-really-far-away from family and friends to be endurable. Witness A: this blog. Witness B: skype conversations with M, and, only moments ago, my family in Vermont, who were about to sit down to a breakfast of eggs and homemade cheese braids. Witness C: airplanes that ferry us back and forth from Brussels to Barcelona to Boston to Burlington (yes, I have already taken note of the fact that the important cities in my life all begin with B). Witness D: e-mails like the one that contains pictures of little nephew and my dad and sis at the computer into which I am talking via skype that just popped into my in-box.

5. I am thankful for a whole lot more besides, but those are the basics. If you would like to know about other things I am thankful for, I can refer you to other blog entries, where I wax cheesy about books and food and travel and language and music, and indicate thankfulness for the big yellow cookbook, the new apartment, the old one, for my job, for M's job, and more of the things I mention above.

6. I am also thankful for a pretty poinsettia, which is sitting on the mantle. I'm getting ready for Christmas.

I only burnt my fingers in two tiny little spots

A friend came over tonight and I made her dinner, because I wanted to try out more recipes from the big yellow Gourmet, and it's no fun making fancy food for oneself, now, is it? (This is why I miss the House of Love. Making Food x People Squared [i.e. people to make it and people to eat it, not Square People] = Good Times.)

Here is what I made, and it was goooood:

Fresh mushroom soup (I told you I would make this again! And I'm going to make it again after this. This time I substituted all-soy products for the cream, and it tasted just as good if not better.)

Roasted beet and pear salad (This salad was both colorful and amazingly flavorful. It had fried almonds on top that I fried myself. Yum.)

Israeli couscous with roasted butternut squash and preserved lemon (Although it was very tasty, it was a tad bland. Maybe because I left out the preserved lemon. Because preserved lemon involved another recipe, and that recipe involved five days' worth of preservation. Maybe this should be a lesson to moi même: never leave out something that is in the title of a recipe.)

Individual molten chocolate cakes (With ice cream. And whipped cream. Molten. Chocolate. Cakes. Need I say more?) (Yes: I would like to add that I love the word "ramekin.")

If you want recipes, just ask! I will send them to you, special delivery speedy fast.

Spic and span

You may have noticed some changes around here. Thanks to the sage advice of my brother-in-law to switch to blogger beta, I can now do fancy things like label my posts and organize them in a more clever fashion (drop-down arrows!). My little loves-to-align heart goes pitter patter at these possibilities.

In addition, the posts are now correctly time stamped with the moment that it is here, i.e., the six-hours-different netherland called Europe.

Eventually, when I have time (today I have procrastinated enough with this little blogging machine), I can add a list of links and photos, and all sorts of other interesting things. And I can change colors and fonts and page arrangements on the blog. So if you strongly object to any given format aspect of my blog page, please feel free to leave me a note, and I'll consider your input.

Plus, I have the power to delete comments, and I now receive them in my e-mail inbox, so I don't have to neurotically check my own blog to see if anyone sees fit to respond to the words I am sending out into the wind.

Dolled up

I'm no doll (in fact, I object to the phrase "dolled up," because no woman is just a doll nor should she be seen as one). Yet, I like to put on a dress every once in a while, and pull out sparkly earrings and that totally cute but useless (it's not even big enough for my wallet) tiny sparkly purse. Especially now that I'm working at home and not teaching, there's not even an excuse to put on a sharp shirt and dressy pants and boots.

Plus, I got new shoes that make even my humongous feet (yes, humongous: size eleven, wide, high arch) look sort of perky and petite, with a peep toe and a little bow. And the bonus is that they're from Payless, so were cheap, but in Europe no one will know they're from Payless.

All of these items were packed in my suitcase last weekend, because I planned to wear them to the opera. But my plans were foiled, because we had to rush from our meeting with the contractor right to the opera house, although I seriously considered a pit-stop back at iaia's that would have involved running at full tilt up and down at least four blocks and throwing on said items in a mad hurry. As M pointed out, part of the point of getting dressed up for the opera is enjoying the ritual, and if we were going to do it in such a slapdash way, that effect would be lost.

So I showed up at the opera in jeans and a sweater, and I felt kind of frumpy and peered around to see if anyone else was wearing jeans. Of course there were some people wearing jeans, but there were also people wearing what amounted to ball gowns. (I suppose if you pay over a hundred euros for a seat, you're going to dress up to match.)

But the nice thing was, M told me I looked beautiful as I was, and then I felt beautiful, reflected in his eyes.

Genius

Last night, falling asleep at around 2 am (for no good reason other than that I kept deciding not to go to bed because M wasn't here and it seemed boring to do so without him), I thought up some really excellent lines of poetry.

But I was too lazy to turn on the light (it's not, as it should be, at the side of the bed, it's at the foot of the bed, so involves getting out of toasty duvet covers and lunging down the length of the bed (it has to do with outlets)), so I just lay there and told myself that I would write it down in the morning, and fiddled around with the line breaks in my head, happily (delusionally) confident that these words were indelibly written into the gray matter.

But now, in the cold light of morning, do I remember a word of it? (You knew this was coming, clever reader, didn't you?)

I do not remember a word of it.

I think *maybe* it had something to do with clouds. Or matchsticks. But it wasn't cheesy, it was brilliant. It had rhyme, even. Clever rhyme, and subtle undertones of political commentary, and literary complexity that would have any New Critical scholar rubbing her hands together with glee. All this in just a few short lines.

It would have taken the literary world by storm.

Self-therapy

OK, so I'm going to cheer myself up by recounting the happy events of this weekend.

First, one of those weird maybe-coincidence things: On Thursday I arrived in Barcelona airport and as I was walking toward the train, a man with an Irish accent neared and explained that his luggage had been stolen and that he needed to get to the Irish embassy and could I spare him five euros?

Now, usually I don't just hand out money, but while he was talking I was thinking that his face looked vaguely familiar. While rooting around in my wallet--no five, had to be a ten, I couldn't very well ask him for change--I asked where he was from, where his bag was stolen, etc. He was very nice and grateful for the money, and as I walked off, it dawned on me: He said his bag had been stolen in the Sants train station! When I was in Sants the previous weekend, I'm almost certain that I saw him leaving the police office with his arms around a crying woman (which is why they caught my attention). Is it possible that I was there when a guy's bag was stolen and then, after a quick trip home to Belgium, was there to be asked for money by the very same person? I wish I had run back to ask.

Then, after dropping my bags off at iaia's house, I got to spend the evening wandering around the center of Barcelona with a big smile pasted on my face, just because it felt so good to be there. First I stopped off at the glittering opera house to pick up the Lucia di Lammermoor tickets for the following night.

By the way, that was the surprise I referred to in an earlier post, my gift for M for his saint's day: yes, you heard right, Spanish people basically get to have two open-presents-and-celebrate-me days. Like a half-birthday. This was, however, a belated present, since I had totally forgotten the day, which had fallen on the previous weekend along with the town festival in M's hometown (because the town's patron is the same saint), involving street food, fair booths, ponies, a Mozart concert at the century-old church across the street, exhibition openings, and "correfocs" (a highly scary Catalan tradition involving people dressed as dragons and dancing around with loud bangs and fire-spouting sticks and deliberately running towards the crowds; I'm always more scared than even the children and am convinced we're going to get set on fire). So every year, if he's home, M gets a sort of double celebration. I forgot about it entirely because we unlucky Americans have only one birthday-like day and do not, unlike Spaniards, carry around mental files of which saint is commemmorated on any given day. For the record, it was my first "doh! bad wife"- feeling moment. Forgot the saint's day.

Back to happy meanderings in beautiful BCN. I strolled up Las Ramblas, admired its graceful curve toward the Colom pillar, even benignly tolerant of the souvenir shops and tourists, paused to admire the candy jewelry in the window at the modernist pastry shop, Escribá, and stopped at the Boqueria market to buy some fruit--couldn't resist the gleaming piles of produce and hearing the fruit ladies call me "reina" when it's my turn to order.

Then I headed right towards my favorite bookstore, La Central, which has a great selection of English books (I've always wanted to compliment their buyer), and a huge inventory, including literary studies and poetry. I found three brand new anthologies of Spanish Civil War poetry, including a reprint of Rafael Alberti's 1944 collection of Romanceros de la guerra civil. Score! I also bought Cynthia Ozick's Heir to the Glimmering World, since I've wanted to read one of her novels for ages. (Finished it this morning: I liked it, but found the main character/narrator strangely cold/absent, especially for a first-person story; laughed when I read a back cover blurb that described her as a "plucky heroine.")

I spent several hours browsing and reading, and then headed to one of my favorite restaurants for solo dining, MamaCafé, right around the corner from the contemporary art museum and the Camper hotel. I wowed and astonished the waitress with my Catalan ("m'has deixat parada!", said she--literally, you've left me stopped!) and enjoyed a delicious meal that ended with--surprisingly tasty--rosemary ice cream with pomegranate seeds, and a chat with an American kid who sat at the table next to mine.

The evening only improved when I headed back to iaia's (M's grandmother's) to meet M upon his return from Strasbourg via train to Paris and plane to BCN (no, Strasbourg is not what you could call well-connected).

Saturday was noteworthy because, drum roll please, we signed the mortgage and the bill of sale for the new apartment! It doesn't quite seem real that we are now in possession of yet another apartment, and that we are total innocents now headed into the project of creating a kitchen and bathroom--we also had a meeting with the contractor, who seems to be very reliable and considerate of what we want (we'll see where that stands five months from now...).

We celebrated by heading off to the opera. The seats were bad (15% and 10% visibility were the best I could find at the last minute), but at the intermission we switched to fabulous, expensive seats. The principles all had exquisite voices, and the Lucia (Patrizia Ciofi) carried off the notoriously difficult mad scene to perfection. I love the interplay with the flute in that aria, as if she is chasing a chimerical happiness, the Edgardo that only she can see. Also, I hadn't remembered how beautiful the harp solo in the first act (?) is. M and I agreed that the costumes were a little clichéd (doesn't every production these days clothe the singers in drab, vaguely world war I or II uniforms?), but that the set, despite its severe gray squares, was really quite effective in conveying the sense of the mounting opposition that backs Lucia into the corner of her murder and madness (from a fem-crit perspective, the inevitable result of her father, brother, and even lover's patriarchal negotiations, reinforced by law and religion, that proscribe her actions from every direction).

After the opera we went to a restaurant we've wanted to try for a while, called Organic, which serves, um, organic food (very tasty). As we paid, the woman who owns the place wanted to know all about our vegetarian-non-vegetarian marriage. She told us about her "awakening," and that she could never marry a carnivore, so she insisted to M several times that my love for him had to be "amor verdader," true love. It was an odd moment to hear a wide-eyed stranger pronounce upon our marriage, but we couldn't argue about the "amor verdader" part!

The next morning--yesterday--we got up at 5 am to fly back to Brussels, so that was it for our very quick trip, but it was a lovely one, and we even ran into a good friend of ours, who we hadn't seen for a while, in the line for our plane. A good end to 36 hours in Barcelona!

s.a.d.

This is the time of the year when everything begins to get dark at 5 pm. At 5 pm, there is still a lot of the day to be lived, but the world seems to be telling you: "Listen, punk. Time to slow down, curl up, and forget about your ambitious plans for the evening. The natural light is gone. Your best option is sleep."

I try to remember that in other parts of the world it is still morning: I'm streaming Vermont Public Radio on my computer, and there, the Sunday morning programming is still on! Also, dear husband is at this very moment flying to Nicaragua, where it is still light out, and warm! To no avail. Darkness has settled over the earth. Or at least my patch of it. Plus, the aformentioned fact of dear husband's departure for South America--a five am kiss goodbye in the depths of my sleep--has left me feeling not so chirpy happy.

Winter has hardly even begun, and I'm already wishing it would end.

I heart Ruth Reichl

One of the prized wedding gifts (thanks, friends at the House of Love!) that I lugged back to Brussels from Vermont in my bulging bags was the big fat yellow tome that aspires to contain every recipe you'll ever need. It's called the Gourmet cookbook, a compilation of the best of the best from the Gourmet magazine.

The reason that this was the one cookbook I chose to put on our wedding registry is that the chief editor is Ruth Reichl. I will follow her recipes to the end of any yellow brick road, because her funny and food-infused autobiographical books (Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples, and Garlic and Sapphires) have made me believe that she is someone who knows and loves tasty food. Must be some sort of calculus in there: honest words sine cotangent derivative root blip blop blippety (can you tell how much attention I paid in calculus?) equals honest food.

Since bringing it home, I've been trying to make something from the Gourmet every day. (I kind of wish the title weren't so posh. There are no pictures, and while it has fancy schmancy dishes, it also has the basics. I'd even say more of the latter than the former.) I usually eat my cereal in the morning while poring over it to decide what delectable foodstuff I am going to prepare in the afternoon or evening. Even on the days I don't actually make something, I still fantasize about making something.

Here's a partial list of what I've made so far. Almost all of it yummy, only one thing burned (in my defense, instead of being labeled with sensible numbers that are actual temperatures, our oven has a preschool-style knob labeled from 1 to 9). Almost everything was made with substitutes and uncertain equivalents due to not being sure if French and/or Flemish labels were what I was looking for. For instance, baking powder proved difficult to find. Had to make do with flour that includes certain rising agents that I hoped were basically baking powder. Also, haven't been able to figure out which cream product is most like half-and-half.

(Ooh, while we're on the topic of why it's exciting but mostly frustrating to cook in a foreign country: it's fall, and I'm craving pumpkin, cranberry, and maple syrup, and I can't find any. I did find one store that sells cranberry juice, which is good, but not the real thing. I found a place selling "pumpkin soup" and snapped it up excitedly, but it was really only squash soup. Tasty, but disappointing when one was hoping for glorious pumpkin. I want to make pumpkin maple pie, and I want to make cranberry sauce, I whine, stomping my feet. Will it help if I whine louder?)

Raw apple muffins: This was the first thing I made because I had to try out my cool new silicone muffin forms. Squishy silicone is so much easier to carry in one's luggage than large muffin pans. M liked the muffins very much, and it was cute when he called them magdalenas.

Coconut macadamia banana bread: This is what burned. But it was still tasty, and I brought a loaf to Barcelona and everyone liked it, even my sister-in-law who doesn't like bananas. The silicone bread pans, also carried in my luggage, were the reason I endeavored to make bread, and they work great except it's much more dicey to carry a wobbly rubber, instead of rigidly metal, thing full of mushy dough to the oven. Much more likely to do backbends when you least expect it, risking the deposit of said dough over kitchen floor.

Beef(less) stroganoff: I just left the meat out of the recipe, didn't have to change a thing, and the mushroomy-ness and the sauce was deeelish.

Roasted cauliflower with garlic: Yum for roasted vegetables. Easy as pie. (But pie is not easy.)

Chipotle sweet potatoes: Though I continue to go pumpkin-less, at least the African markets in our neighborhood carry sweet potatoes, and I made them spicy and good.

Fresh mushroom soup: Made this week, the first night by myself after flying back from Barcelona alone (M in Strasbourg). I think I could eat this soup every night for a month, it was that yummilicious. I will make it again for M when he's back, and I will make it again after that.

Sesame spinach with ginger and garlic: Was kind of a no-brainer, and I could have made it without a recipe, but still. Glad it's there.

Tahini sauce: I bought tahini at the Oxfam store today, and so wanted to cook with it. This fit the bill, and was so rich and creamy put over my rice and vegetables that it was almost too much. Next time, maybe I'll eat it more like a dip.

OK, that's all folks. It's time for bed, and I'm still so stuffed from the tahini-rice-vegetable thing I made that I'm not even getting hungry from describing food. Tomorrow I fly back to Barcelona, for the second weekend in a row, and I'll meet M there, who is flying back from Strasbourg, at his grandmother's apartment, where we're staying for just two nights before flying back to Brussels. Dizzy yet? He flies to Guatemala on Sunday, so we just have time for relaxing on Saturday before it's goodbye again, blech. Although in Barcelona we barely have time for various meetings regarding the apartment we're buying and renovating, the good news is I have a little surprise up my sleeve...

Home again, home again, jiggety jig

Despite the obvious reasons not to like flying (lines, lost luggage, crowds, delays, cancellations), I still can't help but enjoy the method of travel that enables me to get my feet off the ground and fly above the clouds. Every time, there is something magical about the fact of hanging in the air, about seeing fields, cities, and mountains from so far above. It feels like a pause in normal space and time (especially long trips, which do actually make hours appear and disappear).

Take off and landing, despite being theoretically the most dangerous parts of the trip, heighten that sense of space, rising and descending as the real world turns into a toy set and back again. Some of my favorite landings include Barcelona during the day--incredible views of the city's landmarks from the direction of the water--and Boston during the night--zooming right into the heart of the twinkling lights.

And I love airports. Granted, not every airport. I have a particular distaste for Heathrow and its buses, which seem to take you through every inch of the ugly gray bowels of its maze. (Of course--Murphy's law--the connecting airport I most often wind up visiting is this one.) And Boston during the Big Dig was no great shakes either.

Yet, there is always something magical about suddenly being in a different city, with the character of the place humming beneath the bland carpeting and bustling crowds. In London, there's Harrods and Boots. In Boston, a good clam chowder. In Philly, I buy a couple of soft pretzels. I love landing in the south and suddenly hearing twangy accents, or in Amsterdam and hearing the strangely English-like rhythms of Dutch. The smaller midwestern airports are neat and tidy; the airports in Naples and Larnaca feel patched together with mediterranean swagger. In Barcelona, you know you've gone south because there are palm trees outside the glass walls.

I also love the feeling of a vast mechanism at work, and being a little cog inside of it. The complexity of getting all of those people, bags, and planes in and out at the right place and time is always a little bit of a miracle. In fact, I'm sometimes amazed that my bags aren't lost *more* often. (Don't quote me on that.) And many airports, or at least parts of them, have a cool, modern feel that makes me feel like the world of the Jetsons has come true maybe just a little bit: moving sidewalks, huge curving architecture, brightly lit shops, hi-tech screens.

Plus, airports make for excellent people watching. Since air travel has become a relatively affordable way to move around, you can find all stripes and styles. Everyone from Mr. matching leather luggage set to Ms. first time flying, from Mr. baseball cap to Ms. sari-wrapped is there, and the real democracy of it is that even those first-class passengers have to wait in line and take off their shoes and belt when they go through security.

This last trip on my way home to Brussels, we stood in a security line in London for over an hour; there was literally no end in sight as the line snaked down an interminable hallway and then hooked a right into another room. I amused myself by watching the people around me (admittedly, I had the luxury to be amused since my flight wasn't for another two hours)--psychology at work. It was fun to watch the reactions on the faces of people as they entered the hallway and were told, yes, this is the line you have to go to the end of. Shock, jokes, anger, resignation... Even some of the BA people walking from the head of the line to the end were astonished by its sheer length. Still, one eventually makes it through the line, and reaches the other side, albeit without any liquids in an amount larger than 100 ml.

And the best thing about flying? It means that you are arriving somewhere, the anticipation of being in a new place or a familiar place, of seeing new or old faces. This trip was especially happy because when I flew to the US, my family there was awaiting me. And when I flew back, my new family--my husband--was awaiting me here. The exquisite joy of knowing that our long-distance days are behind us, that the return trip will always mean flying back into his arms.

Zippadee doo dah (Mr. Bluebird on my shoulder)

This morning I am awake far, far earlier than I ever get up in real life, thanks to jet lag. It's making me feel virtuous for getting a jump on the day, for making the most of the precious few hours we have on this planet, for being an alert and cheerful Morning Person, for being, in sum, the very person I am meant to be. I am even--let the word ring forth!--awake before my one-year-old nephew.

Sadly, I know the effects of jet lag are temporary, and that the return trip will create an extreme inverse of the situation, during which I prolong the post-sunrise sleep to the point of embarrassment. But just for now, let me glory in the early-morning blue sky, solitude, and undeserved sense of virtue.

In other news, Sibling Weekend is drawing to a close, and what a weekend it has been. Saturday it poured rain the whole day, so we stayed in and played a large number of games, between bouts of eating and vying for the laughs of the nephew. His laugh, evidently, will drive any of us to do just about any old absurd thing.

He is talking in the very earnest way that children have whose words still don't quite match up to our preconceived notions of English syntax, but whose cadences, syllables, facial expressions and hand gestures look and sound so legitimate that you are sure you just need to concentrate, or clean the wax out of the ear, in order to catch their drift. He will inform you in detail, with a concerned look on his face, shrugging of shoulders, and spreading of hands, about something that is clearly important and that you should Take Care Of immediately, if only you understood what it was.

He is such a mimic of sounds: my brother-in-law, while driving, muttered a "hmmm" when trying to decide which way to turn. With a comic's sense of rhythm, from the carseat in the back pipes a higher-pitched and heavily nuanced "hmmmm." Cute little smirk on hmmm'ers face.

The sentence we do successfully understand is, "Where'd it go?" Used regarding anything from raisin lost in high chair cushion to ball lost under coffee table. This corresponds with the kind of game where he covers his face (mirthful eyes peeking between the fingers) and we wonder aloud, where did he go? Because clearly, if his face is covered, we cannot see him.

Today I drive with my sister, nephew, and sister-in-law to Vermont, which should bring more opportunities to carry on this backbreaking and highly important work of adoring the adorable.

Just like parcheesi

Today in French class we had a test. I already know that I messed up some of my answers: For example, I wrote "Je fais de tennis," which is WRONG, instead of "Je fais du tennis" (RIGHT; although strictly speaking, this sentence is not true; I do not play tennis, nor do I plan to in the future). Gee whillikers, there are so many things to remember, all at once: verb conjugation, proper usage of preposition, and proper combination of preposition with definite article (this is where I strayed from the flowered path).

Still--here my nerdiness rears its bespectacled head--I rather enjoyed taking the test. There is always a part of me that loves the moment when an exam is placed in front of me and I get to see whether I know the answers. It's one part drama (will our heroine remember that the second person plural form of "faire" ends in s and not z?), one part suspense (will the exam cover unstudied material?), and one part an elementary school thrill, which continues to persist, derived from filling in the blanks on a clean page.

There is another reason that I tend to do well on tests, a reason that was brought to my attention when a friend of mine came to stay with my family for Thanksgiving last year. My siblings, parents and I were being our usual holiday selves, which means being game-gluttons: Scrabble, cards, Trivial Pursuit, Scattegories, you name it, we play it. This friend, noting our penchant for the friendly games, out of the blue asked (though it was more like a statement), "You do well on tests, don't you?" Pertinent note: she is a teacher, a rocking good one, in New York City. She went on to point out the link between a game (ooh, a challenge!) and a test (ooh, a challenge!).

So there you have it. I'm good at school, in part, because of those winter afternoons spent playing Nertz and Boggle. Thus, in the future, I plan to play lots of games with my children. (Yes, I am aware of the futility of making statements about what I will or will not do with as-yet-unborn children, because according to every parent, everything you ever said you would or wouldn't do is but naught in the face of the realities of child-rearing. Still. Games!)

More glad than sad

Sad news:
M left for Strasbourg this morning. Husbandless, Robin is. Momentarily (see glad news, below).

Glad news:
He'll be back sooner than usual! Perhaps as early as tomorrow.

AND: This American Life is now available on iTunes podcasts! For free! Now, instead of paying Audible for the privilege of downloading a show onto my iPod, I am subscribed to the show and every week the new episode will quietly download itself onto my computer. Like magic.

AND: I finally sent my family the link to this blog (hello, family!), so I can at last imagine that someone out there is actually reading this little blog o' mine. Polite clapping of hands.

AND: M and I got free tickets to an Ojos de Brujo concert last night. Half an hour before the show, we got a call that we could pick them up at the door (our friend's brother is some sort of roadie for the band, I think, and another guy couldn't use them because he had to watch the Madrid-Barça game), and so our evening very suddenly veered from tranquil Sunday night reading, crossword-puzzling, and Prairie Home Companion-ing to a raucous, energetic mix of flamenco and hip hop. Neither for the better or for the worse.

AND: There are only four days until I fly to Boston! Since all of my (four) siblings (and a brother-in-law, a sister-in-law, and the cutest nephew ever) live in the Boston area, we are going to have a Sibling Weekend. This is going to involve some or all of the following: food, playing games, playing with my cute nephew, movies, museums, playing with my cute nephew (oh, did I say that already?)... Sibling Weekend is going to be so awesome. And after that, things will continue being awesome when we drive to Vermont, where I will see my parents, and be in Vermont!

Three things I love about every single day, #2

2. Books

It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I love to read. I am the classic bookworm, the girl who could read through an earthquake. When I leave the house, I always consider whether or not, given the route I am taking and the kind of place I am going, I can construe a possible scenario in which I will have a chance to read. If I can (as you may imagine, often the case), I bring a book. I was always the little girl with her nose buried in a book, no matter where we were (say, at a Phillies game at Vet Stadium).

I'm not terribly picky when it comes to reading material. I love the highbrow, but I'm also content with a newspaper or a magazine, or the back of my box of cereal. I will read mail-order catalogs cover to cover, and have been known to read entire books in a bookstore or library. Give me novels, short stories, travel books, poems, biography, even history (although history books are usually what M goes for and I'm happy to leave him the territory), and I am a happy camper.

As a sample of what I'm reading these days, here's a list of my book purchases over the last few weeks (most of them come from the Brussels Boekenfestijn, where a huge exposition hall is filled with rafts and rafts of books in Flemish and English):

On Beauty, a novel by Zadie Smith: I liked her Autograph Man, and this is even better. Questions of race and authenticity, art and aesthetics, marriage and family, the academic and the non-academic. Based on the structure of Howard's End.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, a novel by Susanna Clarke: Fluffy and fun. Theory vs. practice of magic. Harry Potterish.

The Forging of a Rebel, an autobiographical Spanish Civil War trilogy by Arturo Barea: These three books are beautifully written (and translated--by Barea's wife), and give an incredible insider's view of the roots of the war and the experience of living through it. Gave me some invaluable ideas regarding my thesis, especially regarding propaganda and radio (Barea was a news censor and regular voice on the radio), and is a useful corrective to the utopian idea that the arrival of foreigners in Spain was always appreciated.

An Unexpected Light, an Afghanistan travel narrative by Jason Elliot: I was completely absorbed by this book. Elliot has a great sense of the long sweep of history in this crossroads country, and it helped me understand the background to what is happening there today. He makes sensible criticisms regarding Westerners' reporting of events in the region, and is always attentive to the beauty and warmth of the people, their culture(s), and the landscape. However, I think he employs the same tactics that he usefully critiques in Western charicatures of Islam by reducing Christianity to an absurd fundamentalism.

The Rare and the Beautiful, a biography of the Garman sisters, by Cressida Connolly: I'm halfway through this one, and although the writing is less than compelling, I'm hoping to glean a few details regarding Spain in the thirties as seen from the milieu of the Garmans, several of whom lived in Spain. One of the sisters was married to Roy Campbell, a South African poet who proved the exception rather than the rule among thirties intellectuals in his support for Fascism and Franco (his views can be found a tedious long poem that I wouldn't recommend to anyone).

Still in the "to read" pile (cause of much anticipatory glee):
Cloud Atlas, novellas by David Mitchell.
Ravelstein, a novel Saul Bellow.
The Poetess Counts to 100 and Bows Out, poems by Ana Enriqueta Terán.
Spain: The Root and the Flower, a history of Spain by John A. Crow.
Enola Gay, poems by Mark Levine.

Most of these are bring-along or bedtime books (a little bit of reading before falling asleep) as they do not strictly have anything to do with the thesis. But sometimes I get so engrossed that I have to keep reading...

Still, because I love books, I count myself blessed to be doing what I do. I read books, and I teach students about books. What could be better? In order to write this dissertation that is hanging over my head like a cartoon anvil, I have to read many many books, and for that I am thankful. In order to translate books, I (duh) have to read them. See, isn't life good? I have to read. That is why books is #2 of what I love about every single day.

Reading in tongues

To read a very familiar text in a new language means to make it unfamiliar again, which freshens understanding and provides surprising new perspectives.

For me, this is never more true than when reading the Bible in a different language. Stories that have long since lost the cutting edge of newness suddenly regain the ability to pierce the mind and heart.

However, sometimes the new version leads in rather unexpected directions. Today, seeing the text "Jacques et Jean viennent auprès de Jésus et lui disent..." conjured up a vision of Jesus followed by two guys in berets, scarves and skinny pants, and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Jacques is carrying a baguette under his arm and Jean, a copy of Le Monde.

I'm sure Jesus (or, I should say, Jésus) wouldn't mind, doubtless without prejudice when it comes to middle eastern robes vs. western european hipster outfits.

Three things I love about every single day, #1

1. Breakfast

I am a big breakfast fan. This was not always true; in college I was known to skip breakfast frequently. But now I can't imagine a day without it. In fact--I am somewhat chagrined to admit this--sometimes I even get up purely because I am looking forward to eating my cereal. (I have a good friend for whom this is true as well, so I know I am not alone.)

I am above all fond of crunchy cereals, of the kind that do not wilt and mush wimpily when introduced to just the right amount of soy milk (no drenching, as this would counteract crunchiness). My choice of crunchy cereals tends to adjust to where I am living. To wit: when I lived in Boston's North Shore region, I bought amaranth flakes. Then I moved to Indiana and alas, in Indiana, amaranth flakes were no more, so I turned to Heritage Flakes, beautifully crunchy and slightly sweet. I also, from time to time, enjoy other more widely available varieties of cereals such as Grape Nuts (oh so crunchy, delicious with craisins) or Cheerios (can't beat that nostalgic taste, great with banana).

Now that I live here, the cereal options are drastically reduced, because I think it is mostly the expat community that eats cereal for breakfast. I keep hopping to and fro, trying to find a type that fits the criteria, among which I tried first fruit-n-fibre style flakes with raisins and other dried fruits and nuts. Sometimes OK, but the flakes often wimp out and there are too many raisins. Then, there are the Special K varieties. Same complaint, minus the raisins. The most satisfying options thus far are the "crunchy meusli," sometimes with the added bonus of chocolate (example: Leader Price Muesli Chocolat)! For which I feel guilty, but not guilty enough to desist from purchasing.

Flying in the face of my love of crunchiness, I am currently also enjoying hot oatmeal in the morning from time to time. And from there (since this is a post about what I love every single day, not only the days that I eat cold cereal), I could wax poetic about American breakfast foods: bagels, eggs in every form, fakin-bakin, pancakes, waffles, breakfast burritos, and the majestic yet humble home fry. And then, a veritable rainbow of pastries, including the genial American muffins and cinnamon buns, and that wonderful French invention, croissant au chocolat (see above re: breakfast foods and chocolate bonus).

Last semester a friend and I met once a week for breakfast to critique poems and for general encouragement on our MFA theses. I suggested that we try a different breakfast place every week, as I was acutely aware that my last months in Bloomington were dwindling down. I highly recommend this practice to anyone, as we became acquainted with many breakfast places and ate some truly delicious food. Plus, breakfast is usually the best way to eat both heartily and cheaply.

Before I go, one more thing. I think the topic of coffee (and the question of national coffee habits, the joys and challenges of adapting to them) should be reserved for another post, but it should be noted that coffee is also one of the reasons that "Breakfast" is #1 on the list of things I love about every single day.

Snot

I thought that, if I am going to be a blogger, I should review what other people are doing on their blogs. This was a good idea, because it gives me many ideas for my own. And I learned some things about blogging in general.

First, by randomly looking through Blogger blogs, I found out that a lot of people set up their blog and then abandon it completely. They have zero entries, and their profile is the only thing that makes their blog exist. Or, they have maybe a handful of entries and the last time they wrote was, say, two years ago. I also discovered that there are many blogs written by people who are ages that end in -teen, and that those blogs are often (not always) filled with boring things like "I am going to class now. I just ate a candy bar. I need to lose weight." or excruciating things like "u R 2 cute!!!!" (in general too many exclamation points and too much unfunny self-loathing).

Then, I struck upon a different strategy, and followed links from blogs I already decided I liked, or have been reading on and off for some time now. This worked much better, and although I didn't like all the blogs I was led to, many we were interesting, well-written, or funny. Sometimes all three.

I learned a surprising lesson, however, as much from the boring blogs as from the great ones. Bloggers like to write about being sick, especially of minor illnesses such as colds, and often describe in disturbing detail the coughs, sniffles, achy heads and snot-production resulting from said cold. I have several theories regarding this widespread obsession:

1. Bodily excretions are thought to be funny.
2. In real life, face-to-face conversation, it is not considered polite to detail how many tissues you fill with your schnozz mucus, thus driving people to save it for the blog.
3. As the bloggers are not at work because they are sick, they have more time to blog, and as they are sick, they blog (about being sick) for a greater ratio of time than they blog (about other things) on the non-sick days.

My response to the sick-blogs is this:

I hereby promise to NOT bring undue notice to my personal snot production in future blogs.

Thank you.

Macedonia and sunshine

This weekend the Sunday icon on my little five-day forecast widget showed a sun without clouds on it!

This is a rare enough occasion in Brussels that we decided to go on a picnic. A group of seven, we divvied up what to bring, via an epic conference on Skype the afternoon before.

I offered to bring a fruit salad ("macedonia," in Catalan...I often wonder about that word. Did fruit salads originate in the Balkans?), thinking, like any American, that fruit salad forms an essential part of a picnic/barbecue/outdoor eating scenario. A side dish.

But I forgot that Catalans (perhaps most Europeans?) find it odd and unsettling to combine something sweet with the other things on your plate. Fruit is reserved strictly for the dessert end of things. So, I had unwittingly volunteered to bring dessert. Since in my book fruit salad doesn't quite cut it as a stand-alone dessert, I brought cookies too.

Anyway, not a problem, that was just a digression on different cultural perceptions of fruit salad.

The important thing is that it was a beautiful day. I wore sunglasses! And, drumroll please, it felt like autumn! The sun was bright, the air was crisp, and I even saw fallen leaves. Everything felt golden.

We took the tram to Tervuren, which as tram-rides go, is one of the more beautiful journeys you could hope for. It shoots out of Brussels, starting at the fountainy roundabout Montgomery, and heads right into the woods. You ride along a park-like stretch of road lined with trees and cute little houses, and then into the thick of things. When we tumbled out, it felt like a different Belgium.

We walked over to the Royal Museum of Central Africa (will have to save a visit for another day) and strolled around its sumptuous grounds. These lead into a huge expanse of well-manicured green spaces surrounding canals and lakes, and these in turn to forests with trails and cleverly striped mushrooms in them. We didn't eat the mushrooms (aren't stripes universal animal-language for "back off?"), just took pictures.

But the first order of business was settling down and digging in. Open-air food is so pleasant! Especially after our normal eating-lair, which is our underground kitchen. One relishes food touched by the wind and sun in a new way.

All of Brussels, it seems, went to Tervuren on Sunday (especially a large number of the Belgian equivalent of boy- and girl-scout troups), but since there is so much space no one was bothered. We watched little kids race their remote-controlled boats around the lake, uniformed scouts playing ball and chase, and the rest of the bikers and strollers and skaters and promenaders. We joined in on the promenading. Nothing too strenuous after eating, you see.

It was the perfect way to celebrate a sunny Sunday, and to have at least a taste of something that felt like autumn.

A word from the ward

Last Thursday I received an e-mail message from the Warden of Brussels. I didn't know there was a warden of Brussels! If Brussels is a ward, then are we its:
a. inmates,
b. patients,
c. or orphans?
I wonder what kind of uniform this warden wears...

In any case, the e-mail was a message from my government telling me to watch out for terrorism. The subject heading was "Worldwide Caution"--wasn't it nice of the warden to be so specific?

The e-mail does eventually get specific, helpfully reminding me of virtually every terrorist attack over the last few years, from Thailand, Indonesia, Jordan, and Egypt, to New York, Madrid, and London. Future targets might include "high-profile sporting events, residential areas, business offices, clubs, restaurants, places of worship, schools, public areas and locales where Americans gather in large numbers, including during holidays. Financial or economic targets of value may also be considered as possible venues."

Good, narrowed it down. It's nice to know that ANY place we might want to go, including the places we sleep, eat, pray, work, learn, and bank, are considered possible targets. Evidently the best thing to do is to avoid the company of large numbers of Americans. I tend to do this anyway, not out of dislike of Americans, but because the people around me in Brussels are generally some shade of European. I guess if you live in America, where there tend to be large numbers of Americans, you're out of luck.

The ultimate nugget of advice offered by the warden in this message is: "U.S. citizens are strongly encouraged to maintain a high level of vigilance, be aware of local events, and take the appropriate steps to bolster their personal security."

I'm touched that my government troubled to take the time to send me a little reminder about the dangers of being a human in this day and age. Yet, like everyone in the world, I am only too well aware of those dangers already, and I honestly don't know if this e-mail was helpful. Rather, I first opened it with a slight tremor of worry that it could be something serious, and am now left wondering what it is that I should do to "bolster" my "personal security." Something to do with decorative pillows? It's unlikely that we're going to forget about or somehow not notice the way things are going, globally speaking.

This sort of e-mail also makes me worry that perhaps they know something I don't, but for the sake of their investigation have to make the warning a "worldwide caution," instead of telling us what it's really going to be. Or maybe they're just covering their backs, in case something does happen; at that juncture they can then say, "look, we warned you to bolster your personal security!"

An even more skeptical part of me wonders if this is yet another example of the kind of fear-mongering that the Bush administration engages in from time to time. In order to make us feel that he is going to protect us like a cowboy protects his cattle, Bush first has to make us hyper-aware of the dangers from which we need to be protected.

Incredibly, this warning "Expires on April 9, 2007." What's going to happen on April 9? No more worldwide caution. All cautions will mold like overripe fruit. Or maybe, some six months from now, the warden will oblige us with a bit more specificity. In the meanwhile, I will make every effort to bolster my personal security.

Wheat, wit

This weekend I have been gently contested regarding my assertion that English speakers don't gape stupidly when non-native-speakers mispronounce words.

In conversation about the apartment we hope to move into, M was quoting the Catalan saying, "No diguis blat fins que sigui al sac i ben lligat." (Don't call it wheat until it's in the bag, and tied tight.)

I had momentarily forgotten what "blat" means, and asked. The answer: "wit." My brain did a "try to compute" exercise in which either I had somehow misunderstood the words "sac" and "lligat," or in which being witty had something to do with the rest of the sentence.

During the futile whirring of my brain's gears, he kept repeating "wit," until finally, with unwonted exaggeration, I said, "OHHHH, you mean WHEEEEAT!"

This is when the Catalans present accused me of prejudice when it comes to complaining about French vowels.

I feebly argued back: no, the sounds are quite obviously different! Stretch your mouth out when you say "eee," don't you see? (Accompanied by clownish stretching of my own lips.) Wit, wheat, what, wait...shouldn't it be obvious?

Of course, what is obvious is that a French speaker would be doing the same. "Don't you see? Isn't it obvious? "oeui" is soooo different from "ouae", you just have to make your mouth do this (accompanied by francophone facial expressions)."

I still stand by my earlier comments. I do think there is something rather tricky about French pronunciation.

And in any case, I learned the Catalan equivalent to "Don't count your chickens before they hatch," and taught my companions the English saying. Then, even better, I found out that there's no literal equivalent in Catalan to the word "hatch," and amused the others with this new addition to their English vocabulary. They will now be able to say--wittily, not wheatily--that they have hatched an idea, especially if their brain-gears are working better than mine.

The couscous was delicious

Last night at a lovely French-Moroccan restaurant called Ca Va Se Savoir, M and I along with a good friend of ours (R), and two Italian women (one is a politician here in Brussels, one is a visiting professor), had a conversation that was definitely skewed in the 4 against 1, "you are so wrong, 1" direction. The latter was the Italian politician in Brussels, and the topic was language.

Let me set the scene a bit. At the table we were speaking various languages. Catalan, between M and I and R (is the initial thing going to get tedious?). French between everyone else, and I could sort of follow especially because there were no native speakers. Italian between M and the Italians, and R and I could sort of follow. English between Italian 1 and M and I and the others could follow. Rapid veering between languages occurred throughout the evening.

This sort of thing, I think, is wonderful. I first remember experiencing it at Taizé, in France, where there were thousands of young people (does it put me in "old person" land to say "young people"?) from America, Canada, eastern and western Europe. Everything was in many many languages, and it intoxicated me. It is delightful to me when no one language dominates in a group of friendly people. Inevitably you learn a lot about the languages you understand less, and have fun in the meantime. It is, I think, a European reality.

Back to yesterday evening. Beginning innocuously, we started asking 1 about her local dialect, and comparing it with Catalan. As always with these sorts of games, surprising similarities come up. But then we got onto the question of defining a dialect vs. a language, and she was insistent: there is only one language in Italy, and that is Italian. Why? Because it is the state's language, everyone learns it in school. Fine, but what if the state decides to say that some languages are not languages (thinking of Catalan here, during Franco)? For her, then they are not languages. She insisted, "that's politics." M responded, "no, it's violence."

And it is, because once a given language is equated with power, there is automatically a dynamic created that leaves its speakers with leverage (perhaps innocent, perhaps "merely" political or class-based, perhaps literally violent) over those who do not speak it, or do not speak it well. Read Rita Dove's poem "Parsley," which is precisely what I'm talking about. (You can read it here: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~hbeavers/281/dove-parsley.html) In this poem the word "parsley" is a shibboleth, a word you can either pronounce or not, a word used to control others and assert dominance. Trujillo killed 20,000 blacks who could not pronounce the letter "r" in the word perejil, parsley. Of course, last night this woman would insist that the practicalities do not lead us this direction, that this is an extreme, but the truth of it is that they could.

Further, her solution to the polylingualism of the new Europe is to set up a standard language that everyone should be able to speak in order to communicate with one another; whether it's English or French, make it the lingua franca. Now, if this happens spontaneously, fine. If it happens as a matter of practicality in the EU institutions, fine. But to insist that superimposing an additional language resolves problems of state and culture ignores the reality of the close link between identity and language. As the professor pointed out, identity is multiple and complex, and always changing.

For me, the table at which we sat itself was a refutation of her position. We communicated in many languages, in many different directions and levels of fluency. It was about multiplicity, and conversation, and the give and take of generous interaction. She would say that she wasn't discussing the personal level, but the meta level inevitably affects the micro, day-to-day level.

But this is why I could never be a politician. I am not good at direct disagreement. I kept saying, "no, but it's interesting," so as to, in my pitiful way, defuse the "situation." When what I really meant was "no, you're wrong." The others, of course, do not back down and are not afraid to show their incredulity by

a. knocking knuckles firmly on the table,
b. shaking head sadly,
c. deep sighs,
d. wagging fingers at each other,
e. saying "wait!" or "attends!" or "aspetta!" when a disagreeing party shows herself eager to disagree,
f. leaning forward intensely in display of body-language intimidation.

The conversation was perfectly civil, but I, being shy, shy away from these things. In this regard, I admire my husband for his debating skills. I'll save my indignation for when I'm alone with him, or when I'm with close friends, or when venting on the comfort of an anonymous online weblog. Anonymous, that is, until I get around to sending the link of this blog to my friends and family...

PS

Yes, I even admit to enjoying, to a greater degree than was strictly necessary, sentence diagramming homework in seventh grade.

And, although I recited, along with the rest of the class--

Latin is a language,
dead as dead can be.
First it killed the Romans
and now it's killing me.

--in my heart of hearts, I was fascinated by the way Latin words could contain so much information just by changing the endings. Long live conjugation and declension. Not that, if you asked me, I could so much as translate anything beyond a Bach mass...Latin is my archaeologist-turned-political-scientist hubby's arena.

(Isn't the rhetorical turn in that rhyme great? The way Latin goes from being stone-dead to actively killing, first a whole civilization and then a scrawny, tall-for-her-age seventh grader. Inflated sense of self-importance is rampant in middle schools, I hear.)

On French

Now, before I begin, I would just like to say that I love languages. Love. Words, and meanings, and all the other infinite bits and pieces that make up the crazy maze of a living tongue.

Love English, with its tricky spellings, its opposites-attract marriage of Anglo-Saxony and Latiny words, its directness, its distaste for the subjunctive, its ultra-absorbant acceptance of new words, Bounty paper towel-like. (For a paean to the best virtues of the American tongue, see Barbara Hamby's poem, "Ode to American English." You can read it here: http://memphiswordnerd.blogspot.com/2004/11/ode-to-american-english.html). Love Spanish, with its penchant for reflexive verbs, the poetry of its daily rhythms. Love Italian, how everything said in it should either be romantic or accompanied with shrugs and hand gesticulations. Love German, especially Austrian German, a happy hubbub of umlauts. Mostly, love Catalan; you see, I married one. And when I speak it, everyone is pleased as punch because it's not every day that a blonde foreigner is able to weave her sentences out of this descendant of Provençal silk. (Yes, I'm aware of my distinctly EU-15, limited knowledge base here. But I suspect I may even love Japanese, or Arabic, or Wolof.)

Yet, French has me a bit befuddled. Granted, I have only been in French class for a month now, and I'm getting along well enough. On the page, everything's great, and I understand the grammar perhaps more than your average classmate. But when it comes to making the sounds, it seems as though all the vowels are regularly squooshed together to form quite distinct hard and soft palate formations that I find it exceedingly difficult to emulate.

And the consonants: why do we hate the consonants, French-speakers? Poor little things, several of them at a time, dangling out there at the ends of words where they don't even get a hint of vocalization. Verb endings all sound the same, singulars and plurals, past and present, pronounced identically. Why does something as straightforward as "un" need to contain neither a "u" sound nor an "n" sound, but something more like ahng(=untranscribable nasal utterance)?

Furthermore, when a sentence is all put together, it tends to include lots of extra little "ce"s and "que"s that in English are decidedly pointless, and at the same time sounds about two words long because it all flows together like a little babbling brook. A nasally babbling brook with some of that French "r" thing.

Comparing notes with other French-learners, we've also come to the conclusion that small errors in pronunciation evidently render the words absolutely impossible to understand by native speakers. In English, or Spanish, or Catalan, even if a word is butchered accent-wise, you can probably make yourself understood if you put in the proper consonants and approximate the vowels in their place. Here, on the other hand, I have experienced trying to say a word or two in as many possible ways that I can ("dessert du jour," for example), while a waitress stares at me perplexedly and offers guesses that are incredibly off the mark. Somehow she thought I wanted eggs.

I should say to the Belgians' credit that they at least make a concerted effort, doomed to failure though it may be, to understand. And many, many people are willing to switch to English to help you out. (This in part due to the weird Flemish-French political dynamics, which I won't go into here.) In France, on the other hand, tough patooties. You will get no help, nor sympathy, nor dessert du jour.

Sorry for the complaints. I am sure that I will come to love French, in time. In fact, maybe I should decide to love it for the very things listed above that are ostensibly driving me crazy. Yes. J'aime le français.

Mountain shoulders and fall leaves

One of the things I'm missing here in Brussels is a sense of the fall season. Yes, the stores are carrying little orange pumpkin candles and strange ceramic mushroom creatures, as well as displays prominently featuring brown, orange, yellow and red. Yet there's none of that crunchy-leaf smell, the glow of fiery trees, the crispness of sudden cool. Just a few gray, cold, rainy days here and there, but it's been doing that since August, so doesn't quite qualify in my book.

The sensation is exacerbated by our apartment situation. The large front window faces the street (i.e. anyone passing by could look straight into the living room), so I can never really open the curtains and let in the sun during the day while I'm here working. We've got to find a new window-treatment system. Yet I suspect that even after opening it up a bit the sun doesn't reach here much, as we're on the ground floor and below. Downstairs, where we have humidity problems that bother M's allergies and molest our food, it's always dark. These are all reasons why we're going to move out of this place. We're hoping to get an apartment that we saw a few weeks ago with a lovely little yard in the back and a dining room with huge windows facing the garden that would let in plenty of light without having to worry about passers-by. The only trick is that the current renters don't quite know when they'll be returning to England, so, it's sort of a wait-and-see situation right now.

I'm flying to the US to visit family and friends in a couple of weeks, and aside from seeing them (and especially my 1-year-old nephew!), I'm looking forward to New England fall. Unfortunately, the leaves in Vermont will be past their peak by then, but I hope to at least catch the tail end of something bright. In any case, Vermont is always beautiful. No matter what, even in mud season. Driving up Interstate 89 on my way home from Boston, I always feel welcomed back by the mountains, embraced by their weather-worn shoulders.

Trellis skeleton

The title of this post comes from a Muriel Rukeyser poem called "The Cruise," a wartime allegory (at least I hope it's an allegory; if not, it's a flop). I love how her poems sometimes surprise me with their surrealist and textural juxtaposition of words, and this is an example. I've probably already used up my quota of quoting Rukeyser in my own poems, but I think I may have to use this one for a "Woven Body" poem, which is my series of quirky little pseudo-sonnets that explore different facets of the body: how it works, how we think, how it looks, how it's built.

I stumbled across this poem while perusing the Collected Rukeyser in research for my dissertation proposal. I'm ridiculously happy today because I've hit upon an organizing structure that just might work for the dissertation, after days of spewing squidgy ideas onto a blank computer page. The poems of the Spanish Civil War on and off the Page, or something along those lines. I probably won't go much further in detailing the thesis idea both out of fear of boring my blog-world audience (just play along with the fantasy), and also out of paranoia that someone out there a desperate graduate student who just happens to specialize in the American poetry of the Spanish Civil War is going to steal my ideas. Mostly the former.

Now I just have to structure the whole thing into beautiful and coherent paragraphs. Or sentences. I'll settle for sentences.

I know it's been a while

It is over a year since I have added anything to this blog! My apologies to my nonexistent readers.

A lot has happened in that year; the most important thing that has happened is that M and I got married! He asked me, with sapphire ring in hand, if I would like to marry him in early November, 2005, and on July 2 of this year we gave birth to a little glowing thing that is our marriage. The wedding was in Vermont, all in my home town, reception at the local park, complete with a red covered bridge and a view of the mountain. I know everyone says this about their own wedding, but it was perfect. The ceremony was full of what was meaningful to us. Our talented friends and family sang in a double quartet. I walked in to the chorus from Saint-Saens' organ symphony. My grandfather, who passed away in February, had recorded a blessing for us when I visited him last fall, and we played it just before processing out at the end. My sister and M's brother-in-law stood up for us, and my mother played the organ and made all of the flowers. Our niece Sora was flower girl. I loved my dress, and M's suit, and the colors of everything: birds'-egg blue, touches of purple, silver, and white. The weeks leading up to the wedding had been torrentially rainy, but we had a perfect blue-sky breezy summer day. At the reception, everyone enjoyed the food and the jazz music, and then relaxed on the extensive lawns, played frisbee, strolled by the lake...

Twenty days later we had a celebration in Barcelona for all of our European friends and family (about twenty people from Europe made it to Vermont for the wedding itself). Again, it was fabulous! Except for the dripping-wet heat... I was sure I'd never be able to peel my dress and sandals off, and that my makeup would drizzle down my face in a sad imitation of melting plastic. There was abundant and amazing Catalan food, and a beautiful outdoor location at the Font del Gat, a restaurant in the gardens of Montjuic. My parents were there, and a few friends from the US, but otherwise it was the European folks. Friends of ours sang American jazz and traditional Catalan songs, another friend and our fathers gave toasts, and another, a poet herself, read a poem that I had written last year for M.

So, now we are married, and living in Brussels. We're moving apartments here (this one being unsatisfactory for multiple reasons), and buying a new place in Barcelona so we can rent the old apartment. I'm writing my doctoral thesis (at least in theory), since last school year I passed my doctoral exams (whew!) and wrote my MFA thesis to get my degree in poetry. See, there are reasons I haven't written since last September!

I'll try to be more interesting/witty/anecdotal/politically incisive in future posts, but at least now you know an abbreviated version of what I've been up to for the last thirteen months.