I convinced Jacqui and Matt to try this place out for our last dinner together. The flan was just as good as I had remembered.
Jacqui and I found Matt’s method of filling his sopapilla with honey before eating it to be a bit strange, but Danny said he does this as well.
Last Minute
I packed my things together then went to the grocery store around 1 a.m. for a few last minute things, like shampoo and coffee. I got some detergent, but it was too big to fit into my suitcase.
I also got money for my trip while I was out, but wasn’t able to get all the money I wanted, because of my daily limit, which produced a generous amount of stress.
To the Airport
Danny and Kion drove me to the airport for my 5 a.m. flight, and I just hoped that I had everything I needed.
Minutiae
I sent off my IRB revisions.
Jacqui was watching Top Chef and I wanted to know the story behind Padma Lakshmi’s scar. The answer had a strange parallel to Palahniuk’s Rant, where the characters achieve limit-experiences by participating in urban crash derbies: “When she was 14 years old, she was involved in a serious automobile accident, causing an injury of her right arm, which required surgery leaving a 7 inch scar, between her elbow and shoulder. … Padma describes the event in the Vogue-April 2001 edition as ‘Flying in a car felt like an exhilarating hallucination, an unbelievable ride that oddly remains one of the most beautiful images in my memory.’”
Links
I am inspired to see that there is an effort to make a space for anthropological books that address a more popular audience, but it is also disheartening to see what I am up against. Though, I wonder how they would receive my idea of writing the book in two volumes, the first volume focused on story and the second focused on theory. I think this would be better than dumping academic theoretical considerations into footnotes or endnotes.
I watched a good video of Naomi Klein talking about her new book The Shock Doctrine, where she argues that governments use disasters to establish equally if not more disastrous neoliberal economic policies. It was inspiring to think about history as “shock resistance,” but I am so pessimistic about the world right now that it is difficult to believe there is much if anything we can do, especially because of the need for collective action. Maybe the best we can do is to simply get through this.
De-Stress
I got a response from the IRB, which helped to reduce a lot of my stress.
Experiencing Nowhere
I found it amusing that everyone used their weak or non-existent cell phone reception as an index for how removed we were at the lake house.
Minutiae
Mailed some documents, shot a video journal at the mall, bought a Nintendo DS, got a haircut, and drove to the lake house — I played lots of Pokemon Diamond on the way.
Links
So, I’ve known about R. Kelly’s 22-part Trapped in the Closet epic for a long time — but it looks like the final push for me to watch it has come from NPR of all places!
This American Life has an episode about the mortgage scandal.
I was stressed out about going to Jacqui’s boyfriend’s friend’s lake house for the weekend with so much to do before leaving for Japan, and was not looking forward to being without Internet access.
Into the Wild
WARNING: Non-explicit potential spoilers. Jacqui, Matt and I finished the last fifteen to twenty minutes of Into the Wild. The ending was surprising and unfortunate. I can see people using it to support their condemnation of what he tried to do with his life, though I suppose it was a bit extreme, if not isolationist, as he himself recognized in the end. In general, the movie was good and entertaining, but by no means did I find it moving, though, as I said, the ending is sad.
Minutiae
I got a headache from catching up on my feeds; went to Charley’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers with Jacqui and Matt for dinner; got some swim trunks with black and white hibiscus flowers on them at Academy; called my sister Yvette to wish her a happy 40th birthday; and kicked some butt at Wii bowling and tennis.
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