....

The ubiquitous Jesus

I had the following exchange outside of Target:

Man: Hi, you look like a nice person. Can I talk to you for a second?

Me: Um, sure.

Man: Hi, my name is Mike. What’s yours?

Me: Lee.

Mike: Hi Lee, are you registered to vote? Wait…are you old enough to vote?

Me: Yes

Mike: Do you feel like you care about who’s in public office?

Me: Yes, but I think the election season is over.

Mike: I’m not trying to get your vote. I’m practicing to be on the radio. It just takes 30 seconds.

Me: I’m sorry but I really don’t have time (in that Pruett sheepish way) (Turns to walk away)

Mike: Don’t kid yourself, I wasn’t hittin’ on you.

Me: (astonished) I didn’t think you were hitting on me. I thought you were going to rob me.


I think this simple exchange highlights so many things that are wrong with our culture.
1. Talking to strangers (still a bad idea, but I really wish it wasn’t)
2. The idea that to take away the power a woman has exerted over you, a man, you need to insult some aspect of her physical/sexual being.
3. The idea that we are entitled to request a person’s time for our own self-advancement.

I’m not really that angry, just completely perplexed. I’m not sure what’s worse: that never in my understanding of the world would I assume he was hitting on me, or that I peg strange 20-something white men with baggy shorts as potential robbers?

No matter, my Christmas spirit has not been dampened! There’s a lovely tree of lights right behind my sanctuary (house).



Did I mention the huge statue of Jesus right off the 101?








Oh wait! That’s the virgin Mary!

Also, there’s a seminary near my place of employ with a lovely path to…..






JESUS!



My new haircut (for some reason it doesn’t look good in pictures. Hmm), given to me by a supermodelish woman whose haircut was confusing and nonsensical (that’s how you know they’re professionals).




Tonight's television is truly inspirational: back to back episodes of that ole thorn in my side, 7th Heaven.
What I’ve learned so far (through clever storyline (and by clever I, of course, mean that it’s opposite day)):
1. The dangers of premarital sex (only do it once and you’ll surely get pregnant. Abortion is not even an option in TV land (because if you do, then your character gets killed ala “Jack and Bobby” or sent away never to return. That would force the writers and families to deal with anything APPROACHING REALITY!)).
2. Teenager girls often decline dates with boys who are too experienced for them, and the boys then in turn thank them! (because they were nervous about possibly spoiling their honor)
3. Church functions are the neatest!
4. Conversation are often stunted and weird but without any incomplete sentences.

It’s really too bad that this is the last season for the family Camden.

city of broad shoulders

This weekend I had the delightful opportunity to see some people and places that were essential to the formation of my being. On Thursday I flew to Chicago and was immediately immersed in the scents and sounds of the city that I hate to love (or is that love to hate?). It’s not that it’s a bad city per se; it’s just that every corner of it has the potential to trigger flashbacks to the spiritual, emotional and intellectual growing pains I experienced whilst in its lower belly (Hyde Park).

As you know, I enjoy the science fiction genre. I also enjoy places that could pass for a setting within said genre. To me, the tunnel from O’Hare to the CTA trains reminds me of such a place. There’s a huge wall of glass behind which colors fade into each other in order to give the effect of movement. It’s the brightest source of light in the tunnel and so colorful that it gives that clean, futuristic look.




Of course the first thing I noticed about the El was the pungent combination of urine, hair oil and good ole fashioned BO. The second thing I noticed was how my personal space had grown considerably larger. All of the close contact on the El made me sweat in anticipation and fear of actual human touch.
Once downtown, the excitement begins…




Carson Pirie Scoot was unveiling a rather fashionable window display. I had to take a picture of this display because I love the concept of sparkle in both clothing style and lifestyle choice. Plus, this mannequin could be a doppelganger for me, no?




The Chicago River as it is fed by Lake Michigan. I think they dye it green for St. Patrick’s day.




I arrived at the huge and comfortable casa de Klein and was greeted by some small ladies:

Bassie uses the expression “so so” in order to emphasize her ideas, as in, “Isn’t that so so funny?”




And though I could not understand everything that Dina said, she is super cute and greasy when she eats:





Did I mention the skillz these ladies possess on the computer? At 2.5, Dina can open up a web browser, find her bookmarks and play games. Bassie is fluent in C++ and edits home movies. They’re amazing!




On Friday night, our former roommate, Madeline, came over. She had to leave Saturday morning, so we didn’t have much time. Madeline is currently the fanciest lady I know. She has nice clothes, hair, nails, breath, brassieres, etc. Her job is to meet with very wealthy people and convince them to give her money to do things like save weird nearly extinct animals that I’d never heard of and recreate prairies in Montana. I got a makeup lesson and pointers for looking my best as I am WAY behind in my quest to become a fancy lady. I am firmly recommitted to smelling and looking nice.




I ventured down to the HP for some Candice visiting and Med eating.




I always loved campus in the fall. It seems so regal and European.

















Saturday night was amazing and all I can really say is that my mind was blown. In addition to witnessing true playas in action and some serious letting down of the hair (if you know what I mean), I drank 3 ciders, which is a personal record.

On Sunday I got to sit in an all women audience to see Rachel in an all women’s musical. It was my first experience in a huge sea of only (mostly) orthodox Jewish women.

Sadly, I had to leave on Monday, but because my plane ride was 4 hours, I was able to nearly finish reading The Game! As most of our weekend revolved around concepts within this book, it feels good to finally be done.



Big whoop whoop to the Klein family for the fun visit!

what’s the point of science? and neuroses involving my neighbor

My main difficulty with science is that I find it really hard to understand due to all of the foreign terminology. Participating in science is akin to learning a new language when adjusting to the common vernacular. Today at work, I engaged in one of my more awesome data-related discussions with Jen. We’d been going over the “big picture” of my paper, and near the end of our discussion, after we’d both been bravely using (or for me, attempting to use) all of the right jargon (flux, heterotroph, labile), Jen referred to a pool of available carbon as “bug plant food”. It was then that it hit me: science would be so much better if we’d give up science words and use everyday vocabulary to convey research. Isn’t that the point of science—to make it accessible to as many people as possible? I’ve started thinking of how best to express some of the terms currently in my life, and come up with a few suggestions below:

aromatic fractions: solidified onion ring (ie hard to eat!)
labile carbon: steak dinner with vegetables and a glass of milk
lignin: stale rice cakes
heterotrophic respiration: bug farts
autotrophic respiration: plant breath

Example of utility:

“The heterotrophic respiration decreased because of an increase in the relative proportion of the lignin to labile fractions.”

Translation: “The bug farting decreased because there was less of the delicious steak and vegetable dinner and instead, more of the stale rice cake option.”

That’s so much easier to understand.

Not so understandable is the emotional journey I recently completed in between parking my car and entering my house. As I pulled my hubcap-less and dirty Ford Taurus into my carport, I glanced into my neighbor’s kitchen window and saw her boyfriend cleaning some dishes. While a seemingly innocuous event, it in fact caused me to sigh with a twinge of jealousy. Jealous over her companion living in the same state as her, you ask? No, rather the sort of annoyed jealousy usually reserved for 21 year old girls to unleash when their roommate’s boyfriend is over all the time (sorry Carie, Kendra). The kind of annoyance that, in words, would be “Why is he over there all of the time. Why doesn’t he just go home?”

I immediately started to laugh at the absurdity of this feeling. Not only have I never met my neighbor, I only vaguely know what she looks like. She’s not MY roommate for crying out loud. OK, so he parks in a really inconvenient location in our carport that makes my car-driving life difficult, but should I openly sigh upon seeing him?

Place of joy and contentment:



The most beautiful traffic control box in the whole world:

Pictures of pictures (and other stuff)

For the past few weeks I’ve been involved in the Pruett family photo archiving project. Two Saturdays ago, I received on my stoop a 30 lb box of pictures spanning roughly 58 years. Since then, it’s been a completely mind blowing endeavor as it involves (photographic) evidence (of life) I have never seen and equally shocking glimpses into my parents pre-children (and let’s face it, pre-living). At first I laughed so very hard at all of the silly, happy faces I was sorting. Then I cried so very softly at how all the silly faces were getting older. What a weird, epic journey life is. It struck me that, simply by virtue of the fact that we live for so many years in constant company, we have such a huge human connection to, and almost complete understanding of, our families.

It’s funny to recognize the weird shape of my brother’s legs in pictures from 1980, or the facial expressions of my dad at 18. It is so very wonderful to know other human beings so well that you can anticipate their moods based on the slight tweaking of a forehead. It (growing up, moving on) happens so quickly that I think “appreciate your family” should be a whole class in school. Kids don’t know this shit! They don’t realize that the time they spent dragging each other around on blankets and trying to cheat at monopoly by volunteering to organize the bank will end, and become a distant memory. Oh, how quickly those days of vacation and hating each other turn into jobs and responsibility and the death of a carefree lifestyle and innocence!

As I was saying, the box of pictures (and other old treasures—mom left some other growing-up trinkets inside) is great. Here’s a sampling of what’s inside:

---Weird letters from my mom to my aunt Melinda that allude to some sort of “manners schooling”
---Girl Scout badges I earned when a wee child (which includes the “looking your best” and “healthy eating” badges)
---Well documented history of (personal) awkwardness (so many photos….)
---Coupons from 1971
---Newspaper clippings from 1961 of my mother in gym class
---Pictures of my sweet shy young mother (which came with the realization that she was one foxy lady back in the day)
---Evidence of me spelling my name wrong (sometimes L can be a very confusing letter, especially when an H sort of looks the same!)
---Funny letter to my grandmother
---Pictures of weird Mexican vacations where I vaguely remember racing my brother to the top of some kind of ruins--not understanding any of it in the context of the “world” or “history”
---Tons of “action” shots of Will playing soccer.
---Only “team shots” of me—due, no doubt, to the fact that I never saw any “action” when I was on sporting teams.

Take a look:


















Recent obsession: Catherine Breillat (and France)

She wrote and directed a movie called Fat Girl. The movie itself was very talky and slow (aka French), and not at all clear in its morality, but the extra features were what really drew me in. Most of the extras were interviews with the director. She’s a weird French intellectual, who shunned all of her actors, save for the lead, because she didn’t really believe they were “artists”. She fully ignored them on the set because she couldn’t bring herself to engage in what she perceived as a base level of conversation. But somewhere in all of her talking about the “big picture”, as it were, she started to really make sense, hence my obsession. So last night I watched her film, Romance, which is mostly dialogue and graphic sex (as is Fat Girl) and features a European porn star. And (as did Fat Girl) it had a very weird, almost dream-sequence, abrupt ending. I walked away very confused and questioning my ability to understand art (aka my intelligence). What’s with the kooky French? I think they’re pretty rad simply because they define intensity, but could they at least talk down to us (movie watchers) a little? Must every line of dialogue be a grand sweeping statement about human nature?

I finally got around to watching A Very Long Engagement and Amelie and I have to say that no one does obsession like the French, and for that, I love them. My cunning new plan is to take French classes this winter at adult learning school. Parle vous français?

My favorite book club= The Palo Alto extension of the U of C alumni book group

A (non-comprehensive) list of subjects discussed at the latest installment (in addition to a brief mention of our book):

the non-kosher nature of NYC drinking water
memes
the butterfly effect
yoyodyne
Eisenhower and the highway act
oxygen availability to placental megafauna (!)
history of the Harvard admissions process
decline of print media
Jane Austen=chick lit?




wow.

Fired up! (about so many things)

Tonight, feeling the need to be productive, I decided to make my favorite cake in the entire world (chocolate-coffee-angel-food) and some egg salad. This particular combination of food stuffs requires 2 dozen eggs to concoct. That’s 24 eggs that will probably be taken into my body over the course of the next week! Granted, mostly the whites, but protein, here I come! Being a normal human being (and certainly not a cross country runner), however, I do not have 2 dozen eggs sitting around in my refrigerator. I was forced to trek down to the closest store (ghetto Albertson’s) to stock up on my egg needs. Unfortunately, ghetto Albertson’s does not have any kind of “good eggs”. I could either get vegetarian fed eggs or cage free eggs. Not the combination of them both, and most certainly not with a fancy (and pricey) organic label. This fact was particularly upsetting given that it is the primary grocery store for people in EPA (who are mostly poor). Shouldn’t fancy chemical free food be readily available for poor people too? I feel like Whole Foods should give a 50% discount to low-income families while maintaining their inflated prices for everyone else. It’s frightening that in the US good food (and therefore good health) goes to the highest bidder (the wealthy). Wouldn’t we save much more money in the long-run on health care if we made cheap healthy food available to the poor? Candice says that this idea sounds too fascist, like we’re forcing a certain lifestyle and culture down people’s throats. If a person wants to eat hot cheetos, then let them eat hot cheetos!

Getting fired up about this subject also made me get fired up about other assorted political subjects, like the Valerie Plame thing. I read an amazing article about it tonight that had me totally disgusted with Karl Rove and his evil brain. Maybe it’s just the lunatic liberal in me, but how can the man not be involved in something so treacherous and dangerous? The article explained the difference between the two types of spies that we (as a country) employ and dissected the amount of time and trust it takes for both the spy and our country to make covert operations successful. Other people who associated with her unknowingly could be dead right now, and there Rove sits, fat and content in Chevy Chase, MD with all the other haves. Let the indictments begin! But hey, there are so many Republican political scandals to be following this month that’s it’s really hard to pick just one. It’s like hurricane season for debauched power mongers.
The Iraq war
Tom DeLay
Harriet Miers and the obvious religious pandering in which Bush partook whilst at a press conference.
OK, no more politics for a while. I'll just stick to powering through DVD entertainment!

Then I talked to my wise and insightful gentleman friend on the phone and he proceeded to tell me about the history of the pregnancy test (which is apparently family dinner conversation material). It began with the “rabbit test”. Apparently, suspecting pregnancy, a woman used to have her blood drawn and her hormones were subsequently isolated and injected into a female rabbit. The rabbit was then killed and if it’s ovaries had dilated, the woman was pregnant. From this test came the expression, “the rabbit is dead” or, as Aerosmith said, “the rabbit done died”. I’ve always known that this was an expression peculiar to the 50’s or 60’s or something, but I always thought it was a secret cryptic way to give someone a message so that no one would understand what was going on. Sort of like code, though if it was common I suppose it wouldn’t really be “secret” or “code”, but rather vernacular. But such was my young brain that it could not logically carry through a thought!
So the “bunny test” led to the “frog test”, where a woman’s urine would be injected into a male frog and then that frog’s urine would be tested for something or other in order to gauge pregnancy. This got me thinking about how public a woman’s reproductive life used to be. Just to find out if she was pregnant involved at least a doctor, technician and an animal. Man, thank goodness for the home pregnancy test!

Notes from my DVD player

Something truly wonderful happened last night. I went on a spiritual, nay emotional, journey with Metallica and it was transcendental. If you have not yet partaken in the goodness that is “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster”, then I implore you: go to the library RIGHT NOW and check it out (that’s right, the well-funded Palo Alto library had a copy!). It is like visiting a foreign country or perhaps new love. Totally mind blowing and exciting in that it is so NEW and you feel as if the rest of the world must be nuts for not experiencing that exact same thing that you have miraculously stumbled upon. This is how strongly I feel towards this work of art. I believe that if you lived through the 80’s, or maybe just heard of the 80’s or care at all about fame and popular culture (in a psychological or philosophical sense of course), then you simply must see this.

A few highlights/summary:

Metallica is working on finishing a new studio album. Their bassist has quit the band to pursue other musical endeavors (ECHOBRAIN). The band is in intensive psychotherapy (like every day to the tune of $40,000/month).

This leads to much “processing” and “talking about feelings”. Many statements begin with the phrases, “I’m feeling…” and “What I’m hearing is…”

At one point, there is a big group therapy session with band members and filmmakers.

There are many slammed doors and the hyperbolic revelation (from Lars) that it takes James many (42) beers to be able to express his love (for Lars (who clearly needs it)).

“Summertime is beer drinking weather.”

A scene with black stallions galloping along a pristine ranch!

OK, since I’m in the first stage of love with this documentary (obsession) I cannot muster an analytical/cynical eye towards it. Just be forewarned that there are many, many gems of enlightenment in this one. Totally amazing (in non-ironic way).

This is the last picture of pumpkin I'll post for a while. I promise. But look! Drinking out of my houseplant watering can!

pumps

Notes from home (Oct. 15, 2005)

--Though I may have failed to feed most neighborhood birds due to those ingenious squirrels, I have still managed to make my house a safe, nourishing haven for hummingbirds! Apparently they only eat nectar or nectarous things like sugar water. Their feeder also precludes squirrel paws by its dainty nature.

--Pumpkin is finally off the juice/water/fluids! Since I can no longer afford to take her to the vet, I was entering dangerous, uncharted (or vet unadvised) territory this week. It was oddly empowering to behave like a Christian Scientist, and eschew all medical knowledge and common practice in favor of self-diagnosis and treatment! I wasn’t really worried and was prepared (with trusty ole credit card in hand) to rush her to the hospital if something were to go terribly wrong. But still. My cat has also recently taken to drinking water exclusively from my houseplant watering can, as opposed to her bowl. It’s cute and endearing, but also sort of weird to see her head completely submerged in it.

--Lately, my bedtime reading has vacillated between the scandalous “Diary of a Teenage Girl” which is a graphic novel recommended to me by the wonderful Laurel Frank and is really rocking my world and “Pride and Prejudice” by the insightful Jane Austin. I don’t know what it is with her and Tolstoy, but I feel like they really do get people (psychologically speaking). They both take the time to really develop some characters that I can then take the time to become mildly obsessed with.

--My parents are apparently moving back down to Costa Rica. Those crazy kids! Here are some pictures of and from the shrimp boat.









--I finally downloaded some pictures from my camera, and found a few nice ones!

Here’s the funny skinny building in SF. My BFF is standing in front of it. Apparently we need to retake Pictures for Tourists 101 because we made the time-honored mistake of taking a photo with him in front of the building, as opposed to one with his head in the foreground and the building in the distance. D’oh!



We went on a mission to find the buffalo in Golden Gate Park. We started to doubt their existence as we got lost and confused and walked to the wrong side of their pen. Since we both need to wear glasses and weren’t, we kept pointing to large rocks and asking, “Is that a buffalo?” Then finally, we found them. A whole herd (12) of buffalo, which I was informed, is not actually impressive, as before they were hunted to near extinction, one herd spanned from Oklahoma to North Dakota. They are very cute and oddly shaped with skinny little legs and a huge upper body (sort of like Texan women?).



Golden Gate Park also has these peculiar, twisted trees.



Recent food obsession: Baked Banana. With an ingredient list that has the two trashiest and most embarrassing items I have ever seen for a recipe (marshmallows, corn flakes, cinnamon, brown sugar and banana), and dubious nutritional value, it might seem unappealing. It is in fact very delicious and satisfying.