My Laurels

Anyone want to hear a funny story?  Remember how I graduated back in August?

Well actually I didn't.

Or I did. But I didn't until a week ago. If you can wrap your brain around that.

Here's what I know about what happened: On July 9, I submitted my application to graduate on August 31. Word on the street was that I had all my ducks in a row and all I had to do was rest on my figurative academic laurels.

Then round about September 3 I got an email from the head of the English Department that said, "Oh hey hi. Just keep in touch." And since I still hadn't received an email or a letter saying "YOU, GRADUATE, ARE A WINNER," I asked him what was up with my graduation and he said, "well actually, Idk. We can't find your folder."

Uh. wha?

My wha?

Can't wha?

So apparently someone in the office went on leave and like, hid my file under a bushel or something and even though only ONE step needed to be completed in my graduation application (i.e., it needed to be approved by the English Department) and someone could have just asked me what was up, or, you know, looked online, no one contacted me or let me know what was happening (which was nothing).

So all I needed to do was tell the department head, "Yes, I'm done," and he approved my application and it got pushed through to the Grad School to be finalized. That's it. Why didn't anyone call or email me, oh, I don't know, in JULY or AUGUST? There are only like 13 people in our program. We can't be that difficult to keep track of.

But since I was eventually contacted and they worked out and were nice about it, that part's not really so bad. The person who usually handles these things is on leave. That's understandable.

What really bothers me is the way the school, Georgetown itself, communicates with its students. When I contacted the Grad School if they had gotten my graduation application, I got back an anonymous reply that said "check your online account in a week." Since my online account has about 75 things in it and none of them say "graduation status," I asked where to look and was told, "check your transcript."

Now.... Georgetown is a very expensive school with lots of famous alumni and large endowments. Are you telling me that they can't afford an email, as a courtesy, to let you know that you've graduated? Or, on a related note, letting you know something has gone wrong with your graduation? We have no faculty advisers so it would be great if just one person on the staff paid some attention to whether people were actually graduating or not. And to whether the school was behaving courteously towards its students, who are, after all, also paying customers.

Anyway. After two months of wondering, since there's no clear place to check, and no one on the staff with whom to communicate, I am pleased to be able to say that my online transcript now has a retroactive graduation date of August 31: I magically graduated 3 days before I found out I had not actually graduated.

Congratulations to me.

El Moo.

Yesterday was a strange and interesting day.

Of course, I've blasphemed Uruguay by calling it boring, which I still mostly think it is, but yesterday we found something fun to do.  This month they're having something called "Expo Prado" in what is basically their version of Central Park.  It's like a giant stock show that lasts for an entire month.

When we got there we were starving, which was good because there was a restaurant right inside the gates and bad because it was an utterly bizarre eating experience.

1. About five minutes after bringing our bread, before I could eat any, the waiter took it away from us and dumped it into the basket of the table next to us without saying a word.
2. The waiter seemed deeply offended when he asked what we wanted and we didn't know because no one had ever given us menus.
3. No one would bring me a fork. Which was kind of ok because,

4. The food was completely inedible. The smoked animal carcases cooking outside looked and smelled like a good sign, but what we got was bones and fat that smelled and tasted, somehow, like fish. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad.

After the dining hiccup the rest of the day was  a lot of fun. I'm not sure I've mentioned that the two things Uruguay is most famous for and most proud of are their dulce de leche and their beef.  All of the beef here is grass-fed, which is not hard to imagine since most of the population lives in the capitol and the rest of the country seems to be wide open grassland.  Dulce de Leche, caramel, on the same note, is made from milk or cream and sugar--so it makes sense that they're very excited about their cows.

I've been to the stock show in Denver enough times that I had some preconceived notions about what to expect, and I was mostly wrong.  All of the same pieces were there: livestock, ranch and farm equipment (they had some really nice chutes, which Tim referred to as "hug machines"--this is how I know he belongs in my family), cowboys/Gauchos, horse sports, and fair food.  All of the pieces, however, were distinctly South American.

The cattle--Bovinos-- were calmer than any cattle I have ever seen in my life. They were all bulls and they were all sleepy eyed and docile--in fact half of them were napping. They were in large open--OPEN--pens that held about ten bulls each and the
Gauchos were sitting with them, smoking and chatting with people who came up and petted them (petted the bulls, not petted the gauchos).

And there were so. many. people. It was like being in the pit at a concert, not being in a large building full of sleepy bovinos. The entire fair ground was shoulder-to-shoulder packed with people, which, if I was a bull, being patted on the face all day by all those people, I might find a little upsetting. Maybe they were sedated? Maybe Uruguayan cattle are just way less stressed than the Denver stock show cattle because all they do is eat grass and hang out with their Gauchos all day?

Anyway after petting all the bovinos we discovered that there was also a steeplechase going on that day, so we stood and watch horses jump over walls that were taller than I am and it was insane and terrifying.  Any sort of activity where horses jump or run always terrifies me because I worry about their tiny horsey ankles. Please don't ask me why.

Before going in to visit the Ovinos (sheep) we bought and devoured some amazing churros. You can also get them relleno with dulce de leche, but we just got them plain. They tasted like they'd been deep-fried in salted butter and then sprinkled in both salt and sugar. It. was. amazing.

The sheep were less interesting than the cows, but sheep always are. Except the baby sheep or the ones that are close enough to pet.

Afterwards, and after being nearly crushed to death by the throng of people in the "Brazil" booth who were trying to the get to the chocolate fountain, we headed home and decided to take the bus. Public transit in other countries (even just in other cities) is always an adventure. Like everywhere else in Uruguay there was classic rock playing the whole time and the bus itself was actually nicer than many of the buses in DC. Can't beat that.

War, Freak Shows, and other First Date Ideas.

It's nice being in a foreign country and having nothing to do. I'm almost caught up on my book reviews. Or actually, not really at all. Because I also keep reading. But whatever. I'm probably not going to review the book I'm currently reading because it's written by my Grandmother and it's not yet published, but when it hits the shelves I'll tell you allll about it (it's freaking amazing). Still while I read that I've been listening to audio books (not simultaneously), which is something I've never liked but am working on. Anyway... moving on.

Geek Love
By Katherine Dunn

Oh the mysterious pleasures of the freak show! I know about Katherine Dunn because she wrote a non-fiction collection of essays about boxing that I used in my oral exam. That book and this book could not be more different in every way except to say that they are both supremely well written and they never flinch or shy away from the nitty gritty.

This book is not about gamers or computer nerds who fall in love and experience ennui because they can only really interact through their much more attractive avatars. I'm sure that book is out there somewhere; maybe it's "Nerd Love." This book is about a carnival worker/owner and his wife who experiment with all kinds of drugs and chemicals in order to breed their own traveling freak show. If that doesn't sound at least a little bit interesting to you, we have nothing further to talk about. The story is then mostly about the family and their crazy bodies and minds and their interactions with the "norms" around them, including the cult that follows Binewski's Carnival Fabulon all over the country.

A great deal of the power and appeal of this book is in its dreamy and fantastical language. For instance Chapter 8, "Educating the Chick," begins,

"A carnival in daylight is an unfinished beast, anyway. Rain makes it a ghost. The wheezing music from the empty motionless rides in a soggy, rained-out afternoon midway almost hits my chest with a sweet ache. The colored dance of the lights in the seeping air flashed the puddles in the sawdust with an oily glamor."

I love a book with a saucy dash of magical realism and with interesting characters who can be unusual and mundane at the same time.

I would recommend this book to: Kacie,  Jessica R. and Jessica D. I'm sure my mom would like it too.


Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War
By Karl Marlantes

I cannot say for sure, but I imagine that this book is a fairly accurate representation of the Vietnam war. At least the sensation of reading it, or the first half of it, is. You sort of slog around in it doing nothing for a while, and then things are hectic and violent and scary and gory and then they're kind of boring again for awhile until things start blowing up again, when it's both exhilarating and frustrating.  Like war itself there's not really a plot and it goes on for a very, very long time.

That doesn't sound very good does it?  In truth, it was actually a pretty good book and I generally can't focus on books or shows about war for more than ten minutes at a stretch.

The book follows a portion of Sgt. Waino Melas' first tour of duty in Vietnam and is taken in part from the real-life experiences of the author, a decorated veteran. The book takes the time to explore in-depth the issues that plagued the marines in Vietnam: politics, bureaucracy, racial tension, grotesque health problems, fear, insecurity, hunger, lonliness, and on and on and on and on. Marlantes does a great job putting a human face on these issues and explaining to hippies like me why someone--lots of someones--would persist in such a seemingly godawful job.

I would recommend this book to: Tim and other people who like history, war, and books that have no female characters.


The Daughter of Time
By Josephine Tey

Ok, actually, I don't have a lot to say about this book. It's a historical murder mystery. An injured man looking for something to do stumbles on the idea that Richard III did not actually murder his two nephews in the tower of London and sets out (metaphorically speaking, because he's immobilized in a hospital bed) to find the truth. It looks as though Tey has written a history book with a plot wrapped around it, but the editors haven't taken the time to include an afterword that explains if this is so. And the book wasn't heart-racing enough to inspire me to go to Google and look it up and find out. For all the times this book has been recommended to me it's mostly Meh.

I would recommend this book to: people who like historical fiction? And mysteries? Those are the kind of people who recommended it to me.

Required Reading

The Pogo Party
by Walt Kelly

If you've already heard of Pogo, you get a gold star for the day. If not, you should go read the Wikipedia article immediately. The short version: Pogo is a wily and satirical comic strip by Walt Kelly that ran from the 40's-70's in papers and books. It's about Pogo the possum and the many animal inhabitants of a swamp and their crazy lives. My favorite characters are Bun Rab and Grundoon, a baby groundhog who only says things like "xlg!" and "bzfgt?" His sister's name is Li'l Honey Bunny Ducky Downy Sweetie Chicken Pie Li'l Everlovin' Jelly Bean (yes, I had to look that one up.).

Pogo is famous for having said, "We have seen the enemy and he is us."

Pogo is appealing as a series for a number of reasons but the main three are as follows.

• Kelly was a genius with words. The voice and dialect he created for the swamp characters was brilliant. It's rhetorically complex, but it's also funny and satirical and sometimes just wicked. You can tell he knew all of the rules because he breaks them so well.
• Kelly was an astute observer of human nature. When the characters talk about politics, love, and other human foibles you can't help but see yourself and the people around you. 
• The characters unbelievably insanely cute. I want to put them in my mouth.

In this particular volume, the critters in the swamp aim to get Pogo elected president (this happens a lot in the swamp). All sorts of hysteria ensues.  This is a great book to see some of Kelly's political commentary at it's finest. Though you could always go straight to Pogo's Poop Book (which has a KKK robed figure looming on the front) and "find out the latest poop on" the Jack Acid Society, Kluck Klams, and whose God IS dead? Kelly definitely wasn't one to sit on his laurels when people needed stirred up, but he snuck it in there with adorable, bumbling little swamp creatures which is a genius tactic if you ask me.

I would recommend this book to: People who like graphic novels, cute animals and politics. Who is that?

Carrie
By Stephen King

This book should be mandatory reading for all high school-age people.

Cons:  it's got sex and drugs and religious fanaticism in it. But so does high school.

Pros: Practical reasons: it's short and it's gory so kids will actually read it. It's not The Old Man and the Sea, which is short and boring as hell or The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, which was neither short nor gory and ended up lodged between my wall and my bed only to be found six months after I graduated.

Also, it's about what happens when you bully someone and treat them like a subhuman. It's science fiction/horror so one could make the argument that it's not really about that, that someone who is bullied could never actually do the things that happen in this book, but psychologically speaking, feelings of rage and alienation are the same. And so are their awful consequences. What is fiction but lies that help us understand the truth? (BAM!)

Any book that is both un-put-down-able and makes you feel empathy for a character you know is batshit crazy is totally worth the time and money. Plus it's Stephen King's first book.

I would recommend this book to: Amber D. because she works with high-schoolers, and my cousins because they are high-schoolers, but I think a lot of my friends would enjoy it just for the sake of its awesomeness.

Men at Work

The sun porch--the nicest place in our apartment.

I'm failing as the reporter at large for what-life-is-like-in-Uruguay. The one request that everyone had was "take lots of pictures" and so far the only thing I've photographed is my trashcans. I have a good excuse for this.

Uruguay so far is kind of boring.

It's nice enough. And I suppose I could be taking normal, "look it's a new city," exploration kinds of pictures, but here is an example of why I haven't really taken any pictures: Before coming down here Tim and I wanted to buy a guidebook, but we had trouble finding one. We ended up having to buy one on Argentina in which Uruguay only takes up about 30 pages.  This weekend, being a long weekend, we wanted to go out and explore so we rented a car and then started trying to plan...  but we couldn't find anywhere to go. Then upon discovering that our rental car was a standard, which Tim can't drive, and lacking any real desire to try, we gave up and stayed home for the weekend--utterly uncharacteristic, but indicative of how unmotivating the prospects were.

The view from the porch to the right: Rio de la Plata

There are really only about four destinations in Uruguay that we've heard of so far: Montevideo, which we live in; Punta del Este, which is a beach resort and therefor not much fun in winter; some thermal baths, which are six hours away; and Buenos Aires, which is actually in Argentina and shouldn't be included on this list. There's a famous place called "Casapueblo" that's we're waiting to go to until Tim's parents get here so I'll get back to you about that in two months.

It isn't really a fair representation to say that Uruguay is totally devoid of anything interesting. The city of Montevideo is known for being very cultured. There really is a bookstore on almost every block. There are numerous independent theater companies both large and small. And there are museums all over the city. Apparently, the city also has two zoos. We just haven't done any of these things yet (except the bookstores of course).

Mostly we've just been to the mall. Oh have we been to the mall. We've been to Punta Carretas mall plenty of times. It's a very exciting place because without it, we wouldn't be able to recharge (i.e. buy more time/GBs) for the USB-style modems that we have to use to connect to the internet, and which connect to the internet about as effectively as a piece of ham connects to the internet.

The view from the porch to the left.

 Still... we are bound and determined to find interesting things to do that don't depend on the weather being nice or drinking lots of alcohol. There's always learning the delicate art of self-tattooing or busking for money by performing Abbott and Costello routines on the street, but I think we're going to try to find something with a more local flavor first.

Like enjoying milk in bags.

I thought that Canada was that only country that drank milk out of bags, but I was terribly wrong. A simple Google search probably would have told me that, but I just assumed... Lazy. Anyway now were here and this is how it's sold and I'm only assuming this this pitcher, one of the five pitchers we found in the apartment, is the correct vessel for bagged milk storage (even though the pitcher has oranges all over it?). Who decided that a bag was a good container for a liquid? Don't these pop, get punctured and explode with enough frequency to be of some concern?  I always wondered about the logistics of this and now I know: they're a little shady. These are the kinds of amusements that I haven't been telling you about Uruguay.

A tasty treat.

Heros and Villains and Rats

I reeeeeeeally want to get to a point where I review one book at a time, but I'm so lazy and I keep getting distracted by things like naptime and lunchtime and second naptime. I'm bright-eyed and focused at the moment, and I actually read some great books last month so I'm going to straighten up and fly right and tell you about all of them, for what it's worth. But I'm only going to do a couple at a time because they're so long.

The Help
By Kathryn Stockett

I will admit right now that the main reason I did not read this book earlier is because the cover (you've seen it, the yellow and purple one with the little birds on it) is awful. I thought it was another Elizabeth Gilbert-style book about some middle-aged lady finding herself in a middle eastern country, and by "the help" she meant, "poetically" (read: ungrammatically) "self help."

Now, seeing the alternative cover to the left, I sort of understand why they changed it. Because people judge books by their covers (and are squeemish about being seen holding books with bad ones) not very many people would have bought this book. This cover more accurately describes what the book it about--black women raising white women's children in the fifties and sixties--but we've gotten to a point where even just the image of that is sort of offensive. The truth hurts.

The reader in me loved this book. I cried and cried. It's got lots of subplots and various lovable characters and more than anything it has a completely wicked villain.  The character of Hilly Holbrook is perfectly outrageous. With her "Home Health Sanitation Initiative," which is aimed at requiring all homes to have outdoor bathroom facilities for the African American "help," she gives the other characters--and the reader--somewhere to focus all of the rage and confusion brought on by living in a racist society.

The scholar in me is suspicious of how easy it is to pin the entire racist superstructure on Hilly's narrow, Southern shoulders. I don't want to give anything away for all of the dudes and the three white ladies left on earth who haven't read it, but although I loved the book, I often felt that it was too easy and too un(self)critical. The characters fall too easily and too comfortably into rolls we as "post-civil rights" (such a thing does not exist) Americans want them to fall into. They are "sassy" or "independent" or "old-fashioned." The characters challenged each other but they didn't challenge me. Which makes me wonder if I actually read the cover correctly: the story is a kind of lozenge or self-help for many of the middle-aged white ladies reading and sitting in the theaters, making them feel better about racism and women's relationships and now being so much better than then.

I don't mean that to sound critical of the demographic. Middle-aged white women seem to be the strongest reading demographic out there and more power to them. I'll be one sooner than I can imagine. I mean that an already good book could have done more to bust us out of our comfort zones and been really great.

I would recommend this book to: a lot of people, actually, despite my griping. But I think most of them have read it.

Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants
By Robert Sullivan

This is a very strange little book. It's part science, part field journal, part history. I'm mildly obsessed with science/history books that cover just one bizarre topic (See: Salt, Stiff, Spook, and New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers: Tales of Parasites and People). In this book, one man chooses an alley in New York City and observes the rats every night for one year.  During that time he learns about the history of New York's rats, the relationship between rats and people, the history of that particular alley (which is much more interesting than you might imagine) and the past and present story of exterminators in New York. Sullivan has a poetic soul, so the book is filled with philosophy and literary quotations and he's also not abashed about what a strange person he is. He's obsessed and repulsed by rats in a way that is so completely opposite of my experience that I appreciate his candor.

Part of the book are really, really interesting.  This, unfortunately, is dragged down by the fact that parts of it are really, really boring. If you have a grotesque fascination with rats or a looking for this kind of armchair history/science book, I would recommend checking it out and reading the chapters that grab your fancy. The chapters on Plague, food and garbage are sort of mind boggling, particularly the chapter on plague in America. America! For anyone who dwells in a large city, it will certainly make you look at the streets and buildings around you with a different eye. 

I would recommend this book to: my Auntie Tanya because of her interest in critters, and all my friends who live in large cities.

Oscar el Grouch

Believe it or not, there are a few interesting things about Uruguay that don’t involve how sad my apartment is.

I mentioned the “trash-mules” without explaining them. Here is something you may know but may not think about: Americans produce an astronomical amount of trash. Most people I know have very large trashcans in their kitchen and in their garages (if they have them), and then smaller, bucket sized trashcans in almost every other room of the house. If there’s not one in in the living- and bedrooms then at very least they have a trashcan in the bathroom. Everything collected in these into large bins, which go to the curb, or down chutes into dumpsters or wherever. If sanitation workers went on strike like Sara Cynthia Silvia Stout in that Shel Silverstein poem, we’d all be swimming in filth.

Well. I don’t think I’ve ever travelled to a country with enough trashcans for my huge American consumption-level. In Panama we had to buy trashcans, in France I horded plastic bags so I had somewhere to throw things away, in India people just throw things on the ground so I suppose that’s just one enormous trashcan, but I will never get past the voice in my head that screams, “OH MY GOD, SAVE THE LITTLE ANIMALS!! PICK THAT UP!” I came home with trash in my pockets.

(Apparently--I consume everything on a ridiculous American Supersize Me level. Our apartment came with "one month" of  internet. I used it up in three days.)

Here in Uruguay our “furnished” apartment has two trashcans: one in the kitchen the size of a very small bucket, and one in the bathroom the size of a measuring cup. As you can see from our giant trash pile, this arrangement is inadequate.

I think this must mean that people take their trash out every morning and are not ok with living surrounded by buckets of their own filth like Americans are. But I also know this isn’t true because, like the French, Uruguayans allow their dogs to shit everywhere, and leave it there. I think, maybe, somehow, they truly just produce less trash.

Montevideo is a city filled with enormous apartment buildings. That seems to be almost all it is. Every couple of blocks sits a small green dumpster. The contents of these dumpsters are collected by wooden carts with large canvas sacks on the back, which drawn by mules. I do not understand how all of the trash from four 12-story buildings can fit in one dumpster, and then be carted away by one sleepy, bored-looking mule.

I’m not all that surprised by the presence of the mules—the streets are narrow and the traffic is only loosely governed by any discernible laws (people seem to instinctually know who has the right of way where and when—there are very few street signs and lights) so the mule carts are more compact and easy to navigate than a big truck. Mules or no mules, it was not my personal agenda to produce more garbage than the entire population of the city, but somehow it looks like we’re on track to set the record. America: go big or go home.