party tricks, II

Last night my parents threw a little Christmas party. The party was sort of in my honor, or at least was an opportunity to spend some time with friends of my parents who hadn't me since I took off for Botswana. Some of these folks I've known most of my life but had barely seen in the ten years since my sister's wedding. It was pretty amazing. One of the strangest things about being in Botswana was the feeling that I didn't have a history. When I got to Botswana in 2006, there were maybe two or three people I had met during my first trip in 2004 who remembered me, but that's all. There was one other student doing in research in Botswana who I've known since my first year of grad school, but we only say each other intermittently. So to be in a room with people who met me when I was three years old or so and to get caught up on the lives of their own children (who I knew as a child) was oddly comforting, if a little jolting.

re-entry

For those of you wondering how the re-entry process is going, I give you the words of Norman Rush:

"Being in America is likely being stabbed to death with a butter knife by a weakling."

[...]

"America is driving me more insane than I already am. I know this because sometime last week I felt anguish because I don't own a zester."

But I will say that I'm better off than Rush's protagonist who, poor thing, returns from Botswana to America in the midst of the Reagan years. Yuck.

One thing I have not been able to fix, however, is my tendency to convert prices in my head. I keep trying to divide everything by 5 or 6. For example, if the price of a pair of boots is US$120, I think the boots are really about US$20. Never mind that I'm converting dollars into dollars. Work done on my car to the tune of $600 feels closer to $100. This is rather dangerous, as you can imagine.

party tricks

What better way to recover from several writing and presenting projects and reacquaint myself with my family than to attend the Retinoblastoma AZ Christmas party in Tucson? First, my father and I drove out to my sister's house, more than an hour away. Then we packed four adults (my father, my sister, my brother-in-law, and me) and two kids (niece, 6, and nephew, 3) into one vehicle, and headed south.

The party was held at the Knights of Columbus Hall. I had also arranged to meet with one of my advisers, who lives in Tucson, but I hadn't told him exactly what brought me to town. When I phoned him and told him where I was, he got very confused about what I was doing with the Knights of Columbus. "What exactly happened to you in the field?" he asked.

The party itself was a lot of fun, all things considered. (I was trying very hard not to go all anthropologist on the event, at least not out loud.) There were a lot of games for the kids, and presents galore -- to the extent that I wondered who the hell paid for them all and how. I held my nephew on my lap and spoon-fed him the frosting off a piece of cake as large as his head and then turned him loose. (I am a fabulous auntie.) My adviser arrived right before Santa, which afforded us the opportunity to escape. We went for a ramble along the wash and had a good thinking-together talk. Then my family picked me up and we drove back to my sister's house for pizza, beer and regional football.

It was great to see my adviser, who I haven't seen very often over the year. And it was really, really lovely to talk for a while with someone who's as concerned with anthropological theory as with the use of rifampicin to treat tumors. But the best moment of the day was when my car-and-truck-obsessed nephew, who is moment by moment making himself and being rather avidly made into a properly gendered subject, came toddling toward me sporting a five-inch-tall sparkly pink party crown. Aw, yeah.

witchy

Well, I'm back in America, where sane adults are willing and prepared to hold funerary services over something the size of a pencil dot.

Contemporary American genetic determinism: it's fuckin' witchcraft, man.