views of the new apartment

My new apartment is at the top floor of a three-story walk-up, so I haven't really moved in yet. But here are some nice shots to familiarize you with the place.

There are no good shots et of the front room (which serves as a study), but it's modeled off the back room (here the living / dining room) with a wall of eastern windows overlooking the street.

Let's being the tour with a view down the hallway from just inside the front door...

... and into the living room / dining room. (A pair of couches is hidden in the left-hand corner.)

A glimpse through the living room / dining room and into the kitchen...

A cozy enough place to curl up in the sunshine:

The kitchen and--staggeringly enough--the dishwasher:

A glimpse into the pantry where the refrigerator lives:

A view from the kitchen into the living room:

Living room sunshine:

The bathroom:

My room, full of things I haven't seen in years:

Afternoon sunshine from the back balcony:

a caution

Do not write your sweetie a poem;
It’ll only show how well you don’t know ‘im.
The rhyme and the verse
Go from bad to worse,
So take your sweet posies and stow ‘em.

self-entertainment

You know you've been off your feet and housebound for too long when what passes for amusement are fantasies of marking papers with metered verses, e.g.:

This paper’s thesis is shit;
You hardly articulate it.
Your writing’s confusing
And not worth perusing;
I cannot be bothered with it.

or this one, the last line of which is something Gordon Ramsay says to a young chef in an episode of Kitchen Nightmares (UK version):

You paper is too long, so cut it.
The topic is interesting, but it
Has too many words:
Reduce it by thirds.
Now, back in your corner and shut it!

If you like these, I did a whole series of limericks and clerihews about Foucault last winter. I still aspire to write a double dactyl someday. And yes, I concede that I'm barking mad.

ok, yeah, I'm done...

Since arriving back in Chicago in January, I have been subletting a furnished room from a friend. It was easier than trying to get all of my things out of storage and set up in the very moment I began teaching. I share the apartment with two other women. The apartment has also contained furniture and sundries--notably two cats--belonging to other former occupants who left the country for their fieldwork. The household generally stays relatively intact, though there is a constant question of what belongs to whom and when it might disappear for some reason. We had, for example, a general shuffle when one former occupant returned from the field to claim a good deal of the living room furniture, some kitchen items, and the cats. One current housemate, who researches food and has a well-equipped kitchen, then moved her own kitchen things out of storage and into the kitchen and moved her boyfriend's furniture into the living room. The other current housemate doesn't really cook or bake (and who can be a little lax on the cleaning front).

Now, I have been living in other people's households and sharing accommodations in one sense or another since... August 2006. I haven't seen my own furniture in so long I have forgotten that it exists, let alone what it looks like. I've been relatively comfortable with this.

But perhaps it's the conversation I had with one colleague about her commitment to living alone, struggle as she may with her finances. Or the conversation with another colleague concerned of late with stocking her pantry and sorting her wedding china into a recently-acquired china cabinet. Either way, when I went into the kitchen this morning to assemble some home-made huevos rancheros---the perfect breakfast for the rather-too-late night and the rather-too-early morning---the fact that I could not, search as I might, locate a goddamn manual can-opener to open a can of refried beans put me into a rage. That's it. I'm done. Come November, when I find myself another living situation, I am done with communal living. No more. I will live by myself, I will perhaps live with a partner, but I will have done with this hodge-podge, mishmash, patchwork style of household. Done, I say.

it's complicated...

OK, I'm going to be annoyed for a moment. There's a certain trick some of my colleagues have. (I'm sure I have it too, but right now I'm annoyed by my colleagues more than I am by myself in this particular regard, so they are going to bear the brunt of my complaint, be it fair or not.) It's a certain high-handedness when describing one's field site seen best perhaps in hesitant, drawn-out responses to relatively simple questions, usually prefaced by drawling the statement, "Well, it's complicated." No shit, Sherlock, it's complicated--as socialities usually are, and that's why it's presumably interesting enough for you to write an entire book on the subject.

Now, I'd like to believe there's a way of describing the sociology of a place one knows, or is coming to know, that lets the listener know that, yes, things are complicated, but that nevertheless attempts to give the listener the benefit of the doubt of average intelligence when it comes to grasping the fact that a short response may not adequately capture all the nuance a the speaker--or listener, for that matter--might want in a description. I like to think that we can sort of give each other the benefit of the doubt when it comes to explaining bits and pieces of places to which our colleagues may never have been and which they may never have studied.

But there's also a way of drawling out the complicated nature of one's field site that I just find off-putting. It's something like, "Well, I'd try to explain it, but you wouldn't really understand, as evidenced by your simplistic questions regarding such-and-such." As if the complexities of the place were really beyond explanation--at least to you--because, well, it's complicated. My stars. Really. As if this conversation were a forum in which we hammer at each other regarding the relative complexities of our field sites: the more complex one's site, obviously the better the ethnographer. At what point did an inability to articulate become a badge of honor? O academia, you make me tired sometimes.

the dangling carrot

So, as of last night, I have squared away my flight to Amsterdam and twelve nights of accommodation split evenly amongst two locations. The first is a studio apartment in an area of Amsterdam known as De Negen Straatje, or The Nine Streets. The second is a private en suite room in a hostel on the edge of a large public park, just slightly south-west of the first location.

Neither location is quite in the bleeding heart of the city, for which I'm grateful. I don't really have any desire to be smack in the middle of a bunch of doped-up twenty-something tourists behaving badly in the Red Light District. I'm excited because this arrangement will let us get to know Amsterdam from more than one vantage point. I'm also excited to be spending time in a city best explored by foot. (I've been warned against renting a bike in the city and getting horribly lost/in the way of the poor Amsterdammers who are just trying to get to or from work. Instead, I'm hoping we can take a train a bit outside the city, rent a bike at the station and cycle round the countryside.)

So, now that I have the carrot firmly fixed in place, let's see if I can get done the work that must be done before I leave!

lucky girl

I bet you didn't know that The Joy of Cooking includes a set of instructions regarding how to skin a squirrel with one's boot. Thanks to my brilliant conversational skills, a couple of my advisers now know this too...

This has been a remarkable week--well, relatively remarkably for a woman whose life currently consists of read-mull-type-read-mull-type, etc.--for two reasons. First, thanks to a friend's kindness and to being in the right place at the right time, I have an office until the beginning of September. This arrangement is very much on the quiet, and the office will dearly need to acquire a fan in the coming week. But I'm thoroughly chuffed to have a place in which I can leave books and papers, no longer needing to drag whatever it is I'm working on from home to school and back again.

Second, I got a job without really having to apply for it. I've been hired "on retainer" by a professor who'll be out of the country for the summer. My job is to wait for an email from her asking for a particular article or a portion of a book, and then scan it and email it to her. I get paid whether she actually requests anything or not; I get paid more if I go over the hours already allotted to me.

Between all this and the temperature finally rising above 80 F, I've got nothing to complain about.

I am asked

Yesterday was my first time at bat with the "So, are you going on the job market in the fall?" question.

Even being asked if I'm going on the job market is... exciting, terrifying, confusing, shocking, and a lot of fun.

The answer is: No. I can think of at least two moments in my graduate school career when I have written what turns out to be a successful application for something I wasn't entirely prepared--if only emotionally--to accept. I would hate to find myself in the position of spending time on applications to the expense of the dissertation only to find myself suddenly needing a complete draft. No, thank you. I think a little longer in the oven isn't going to hurt, particularly in this economy.

But it's nice to asked!

recuperation

I've been traveling quite a bit within the US--enough so that I wound up at the Minneapolis/Saint Paul airport twice in one week. (It's actually a cute little airport.) Since I'm sort of between projects--or more accurately, I've read enough for the current project that I need to start writing about what I've read before I read more--I've been catching up on fiction while in flight. Here are the books I've been reading:

The Historian

I found this book horribly frustrating; I particularly disliked the author's characterization of academic labor. (I didn't really like Dracula either, and sometimes epistolary novels rub me the wrong way.) But I kept reading it, largely for its account of the landscape of south-eastern Europe and to find out how the story would end. The books most redeeming moment is when one of the characters is condemned to the eternal torture of cataloging Count Dracula's library in Latin equipped with only a typewriter. I found this hilarious; I think it was supposed to be tragic.

Watership Down

Rabbits and WWII-era British codes of honor: what can be wrong about that? Somehow I passed three decades without ever reading this. I'm glad this is no longer the case. Frankly, I used Adams' prose to wash the taste of The Historian out of my mouth.

City of Thieves

This was an interesting story, and I particularly liked the depictions of WWII-era Leningrad. My primary complaint is that it rather reads like a screenplay: the characters are somewhat flat, and the story wraps up a little too predictably. It got me from Chicago to Pittsburgh; I'm not sure it could do more.

Lavinia

I first encountered Le Guin's writing in the Earthsea chronicles. I'm picky as sin about my fantasy, and Le Guin delivers. She's also the daughter of an anthropologist, which endears her to me because I ascribe to it her attentiveness to portraying the everyday life of the imaginary worlds about which she writes. And while my unfamiliarity with the Aeneid made me feel a bit inadequate approaching this book, I thought it was a beautifully crafted text. It made City of Thieves feel about as substantial as a paper coffee cup.

The Gathering

This book came to my attention because it won the Man Booker Prize. I don't love everything that has won the prize, but I feel so much of it is quality writing that it's a good place to go for a reading list. I'm glad I picked up The Gathering. Enright can write, and she can write about grief in a way that expresses horror without becoming either maudlin or sentimental. Jodi Picoult can put that in her pipe and smoke it...

Next on my list: Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried...

polyclinic

"The author lays the idea on the marble table of the cafe. Lengthy observation, for he makes use of the time before the arrival of his glass, the lens through which he examines the patient. Then, deliberately, he unpacks his instruments: fountain pens, pencil, and pipe. The numerous clientele, arranged as in an amphitheater, make up his clinical audience. Coffee, carefully poured and consumed, puts the idea under chloroform. What this idea may be has no more connection with the matter at hand than the dream of an anaesthetized patient has with the surgical intervention. With the cautious lineaments of handwriting, the operator makes incisions, displaces internal accents, cauterizes proliferations of words, inserts a foreign term as a silver rib. At last, the whole is finely stitched together with punctuation and he pays the waiter, his assistant, in cash."

-- Walter Benjamin, from One-Way Street

such great Hoyts

A note from the field:

“Sure, I came here with an interest and a method, but I had a lot of real problems. Fieldwork for me does not draw on ‘natural’ personality trains… I am not basically gregarious by nature. Fundamentally, I do not like the bulk of fieldwork. I do not like making contacts. I do not like the small talk that I have to go through to set up interviews. Until I painfully established rapport here, until at last I found a few reflective, philosophical informants who for me were intrinsically satisfying, I was not enjoying myself—I was working, collecting data and not knowing where I would end...

"[T]here was a time toward the beginning of our stay that I went absolutely berserk. I mean crazy!... There were times that I felt totally inadequate—times when I feared I lacked the ability to see this through… I lived between two worlds. I did nothing, I left this lolwapa [family compound], walked out of sight, and sat under a tree. I experienced for the first time in my life the sensation that I could not communicate my feelings. I can’t even tell you now what they were. Looking back, I can’t understand myself. I was nowhere, I suppose, and I just withdrew."

—Hoyt Alverson, commenting on fieldwork in Botswana in the mid-1970s, as voiced by his wife, Marianne Alverson, in her memoir, Under African Sun (1987), 187-88.

I love this passage for the image of Alverson nonchalantly walking away from the lolwapa to do his fieldwork as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth and then hiding under a tree. I think we fieldworkers have all, at one point or another, hidden under a tree in some sense. But it's a strange thing to try to write about, not least of all the moments when one is most concerned with asserting one's authority (i.e., the dissertation). So it's also interesting to me that the experience is recounted by Marianne in a memoir. There's a lot to be said here about genre, voicing, authority, and narrative--not to mention the gendered division of expressive labor--but I'll let you, gentle reader, mull that over on your own time.

special affects

Just to show you how ridiculous academics can be, particularly when they're on a self-reflexive bent, I give you an exchange between me and Professor X, who studies, amongst other things, media and affect, and who is currently teaching a course entitled Public Affect. He is relatively young, ordinarily quite poised, dresses hip (if you will) and is generally regarded as a cool character.

Despite the fact that I have almost no professional interaction with Professor X and have never taken a class from him, we are quite aware of one another's existence. In fact, in the week or so prior to the following exchange, we had run into each other in the gym, the noodle shop, etc. Until this moment, however, I don't think we had ever actually said more to one another than "hello." Not once. (I should mention too that Prof. X hails from the other side of the pond.)

Setting: a public lecture

Me: How are you?

Professor X: I'm good... Actually, I'm increasingly unhappy with how I answer that question. "Good" is an adjective and is therefore grammatically incorrect; one ought to answer, "I'm well..."

Me: Yes, Americans tend to say "good," don't they? In southern Africa...

Professor X: [not really listening] ... but adverbs don't seem like a good solution. "I'm well" sounds stuffy, and even "I'm fine" sounds defensive, as in, "I'm fine!

Me: "OK" isn't really going to be of help here, is it?

Professor X: No, not really... It's still an adjective.

a pause

Me: So, how's public affect?

laughter

I hadn't actually meant to be quite that droll; it was a fortuitous accident. But hell, Professor X just out-awkarded nearly everyone I know. Now I can't ever inquire as to his well-being without worrying that I'll provoke a crisis.

cult of affliction

Over beers last night I articulated a theory I've been working on for some time, to wit: You know you have been initiated into graduate school, or at least into the informal departmental sub-categorization to which I sort of subscribe--what you might call my cult of affliction--when you find yourself awash with two feelings: 1) bottomless performance anxiety; 2) jealousy. In order to make it, you need to get in touch with those two feelings but not be dominated by them. If you can do that, you'll be ok.

wah, wah, wah

My adviser didn't care much for the draft out there that sort of exists as my first chapter.

Wah, wah, wah.

Well, I shouldn't be that surprised... A) It's in a very different theoretical vein than the ones she tends to mine; B) It's limited to a very small institutional space really and doesn't have that much in the way of ethnographic / sociological context... And it's a draft, for heaven's sake. To be fair, it's very limited in scope and says nearly nothing about southern Africa, and I think that freaked her out. But she didn't like the argument, and she didn't seem to like the writing, and having one's adviser really not dig one's work isn't much fun.

Last week I wrote a 1500-word report for one of my granting agencies. That she seemed to like...

I know, I know... It's not the end of the world, it's a draft, it's whatever, I just got back, she's crazy-busy this term, etc. My other advisers don't seem as perturbed or put off, and (as my house-mate reminded me) at the end of the day, it's my thesis. But still: not fun.

To sum up...

Scene: a coffeeshop with high glass windows overlooking a city street

Me: My adviser says I'm writing about the management of national death.

Friend: Oh, you mean the healthcare system?

End scene

look, ma, i'm famous...

I swear to god I did not pay anyone to do this... I'm signed up to receive new content from this website whenever it's added, and the text of the post simply appeared in my email box just now. But at least whoever this person is spelled my name correctly, which is more than I can say for the fifty billion people who emailed me individually asking for copies of the list.

the strange condition of my labor

My teaching obligations ended last Tuesday, more than a week ago. Since then, I've only been holding office hours and waiting for my students to write their final essays so I can mark them.

I've got a number of writing projects on my plate, including a syllabus competition and write-up fellowship applications. The deadlines are hanging over my head. April is hell: it's the month when we, grad students who are funding ourselves from year to year, scramble to find a way to keep body and soul together over the coming academic year. (Never mind the odd predicament of syllabus competitions, in which the prize one wins is the privilege of working...)

I haven't needed to be on campus much, and I find myself slipping further into some old habits from the field. When I wasn't at one hospital or another or one meeting or another, I would sometimes roll out of bed and sit down at my computer with a cup of tea for a couple of hours, only bathing and dressing later in the day.

Maybe this sounds Proustian; to most people, I think it looks at least slovenly if not downright slothful to be wandering around with shower-wet hair at half past noon. (This was even more so the case in Botswana, when the working day begins at half past seven, or even seven.) But how to explain I work from home, I sleep in the same room in which I work, and I've been up since a reasonable hour, working away at something-or-other without even breakfast inside me? No one takes my fleece pyjamas as working attire.

what success doesn't feel like

The sucky thing about grading is reading uneven essays that sort of get the point -- or even worse, nail half the points and totally mangle the other half. You think, "I taught this? This is what you took away from class?" Aggh.

It's even suckier when you're doing this late at night. It's 10th week. No matter where you are, 10th week hunts you down and kicks your ass.

where am i again?

I had a lovely chat last night with a classmate in Canada. She asked how my re-acculturation process was going. I told her that it was getting better, and that I'd almost learned to spell like a proper American, using zeds.

Except that Americans don't use zeds. They use zees.

Oh, well.

the good with the bad

It's sad when you realize that the mountain of grading in front of you only exists because you were dumb enough to give the assignments.

But it's happy when you get to read lines like this one:

In the case of the conquest of America... the war is justified, because for Sepúlveda, "one has the right or even the duty to impose the food on others" (Todorov 154).

Mark this well: It's the ones that get by spell-check that kick your ass -- every time.

what success feels like

I've been teaching Foucault's Discipline & Punish. Today a student walked into class and said to me, "After reading this, I feel like I've been living a lie."

I think I broke his head. Mission accomplished, and we haven't even hit the panopticon yet. I feel pretty great about it, particularly since I've been struggling to explain Foucault's attempt to demonstrate the historicity of 'the individual' as a category.

I told this story to a couple of friends who are advanced graduate students in my department. Every single one of them cheered when I got to the end of the story.

I just think it's funny that my friends and colleagues are congratulating me for breaking this poor kid's head. What a strange little collectivity we are.

habit

I know a surprising (alarming?) number of people who, in the course of writing their dissertations, have begun (or in some cases, finished) work on a novel. I am not and have never been a fiction writer, but I find myself in some old habits nonetheless...

Foucault looked up with elation,
Said, "Power: it works by gradation:
What Marx almost got,
(Why my books are fraught)
Is: We strive towards our own domination!"

Oh, it's on with Mr Bacon, by the by. And I sent my committee of advisers a set of chapter abstracts--more to get them out of my mind than anything else, because I couldn't move onto more pressing tasks until I did so.

never too much of a good thing

Some of ye may remember that I presented a paper at a conference last August in Rotterdam. The conference also included a mentoring program: you sign up, and some group of people somewhere matches you with someone who presumably shares your interests. Now, those of ye who know me know that I am a total sucker for this kind of shit. What the hell have I got to lose? The worst thing that could happen is I waste a little time and anxiety talking to someone with whom I don't connect and from whom I don't think I can learn anything. But I'm optimistic, and I like to stretch my little tendencies toward extroversion in structured circumstances from time to time.

The powers that were assigned me Mr Bacon as a mentor for the purposes of this exercise. Actually, cruelly-humored Fate had a hand in this assignment, because Mr Bacon is the editor of a journal that sort-of-rejected an essay of mine in a very weird and difficult-to-interpret way. Mr Bacon was very nice about the whole thing. We met up at on the little mentor-mentee evening at a bar the organization in charge of the event had booked. He bought me a couple of beers and we talked shop. We did talk about my essay, but obliquely and only towards the latter end of the beers, thank god.

So that was fine. Mr Bacon isn't in my field, and while it was lovely to chat with him, I expected that the next time we'd communicate would be several years down the road when maybe-maybe I had I something that might float in the journal he edits.

Well, son of a bitch, Mr Bacon sent me an email yesterday saying that he's putting together a panel and wants to know if I'd like to participate (assuming I have something relevant).

Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

I know, I know: you're thinking, What the hell's wrong with you, Betswana? What a nice opportunity. This is true--I got to spend yesterday morning hyperventilating--except that: 1) I know at least one of my committee members thinks I need to get off the conference circuit and write my dissertation already; 2) This is not a grad student panel, it includes a couple of hot names whose work I know, and therefore the fear of making an ass of myself is acute; 3) I'm not entirely sure I have anything relevant.

But I couldn't just let the message sit there whilst I hid under my bed and focused on biting my fingernails. So I sent an email thanking him and letting him know what I can see myself putting together that I think is at least somewhat related to what he's doing. Part of me wants a nod; part of me wants him to say thanks maybe some other time so I can relax. I feel so juvenile. Maybe it's because I've been mainlining Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes again, but why has no one bothered to tell me that academic networking feels like high school?

writing

It's astonishing how difficult it is to accustom myself to the fact that no one is going to pop out of the woodwork and accuse me -- at least, at this stage in writing -- of being crazy and/or wrong.

It feels very precarious. I almost wish someone would.

seige?

OK, what is going on???

UB closes indefinitely

The University of Botswana (UB) has been closed indefinitely after four days of class boycotts and violence. The violence was directed at fellow students who did not want to participate in the boycotts...

UB seige

There was palpable fear among students at the University of Botswana on Monday afternoon as scores of Police Special Support Group (SSGs) members surrounded the main campus, “to control the situation and protect the public to ensure that there is law and order,” according to Police Service Public Relations Officer Mr. Christopher Mbulawa...

we suck the young blood

I'm coming to love a certain look of confusion. It's not the variations on the look that says, "I really don't understand what you said because I didn't do the reading." It's the look that says something like "processing": something like a three-dimensional huh?, if you can imagine such a thing. It's a confusion that has work to do.

That I dig the teaching thing is not new to me, but it's nice to feel myself getting better at it.

and so it begins...

I don't have TB, by the way.

I do have a problem child. I have that kid. The theory goes that every class has one -- and, if the instructor is lucky, no more than one. I've dealt with that kids before, but only as a TA. I've never really had to handle one head-on. But I'm pretty sure that kid, in his/her various forms, will be a constant feature of my teaching career, so I had better get used to facing the problem.

Figuring out how to respond to that kid with something that cuts between the Scylla and Charibdis of too much intimacy, on the one hand, and too much smack-down, on the other, is difficult. That kid is not a bad kid. He or she is usually confused. That kid's problems often have little or nothing to do with class material and everything to do with that tangled snarl of questions that connects Does mommy really love me? to What is the nature of the universe? and tries to work Durkheim's theory of totemism into the bargain. That kid can't write the essay because six pages on Durkheim feels insurmountable. This has nothing to do, I think, with that kid's actual grasp of Durkheim. And at the end of the day, it's really not a problem best addressed to the instructor. That kid needs a referral.

I think many of us can point to some painful and awkward communiqué we once launched at an instructor that seemed like a good (if not exactly appropriate) idea at the time. I'm fairly sure I did, though I don't really remember an instance and I have no record to prove it. Perhaps it's better that way...

inaugurate this!

If you were a student in my social theory class, you would have received an assignment to write a 6-8 page paper on one of three topics related to Émile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, in which he examines totemism to find the basic precepts that inhere in all religious thought. Since this is no ordinary day, however, the third topic read as follows:

One of the most easily recognized elements of the Obama campaign has been the slogan, “Yes We Can.” Some critics have pointed to the emptiness of the utterance, inasmuch as fails to indicate the object of ‘our’ action, i.e., “Yes, we can do what, exactly?” If this is true, we could contemplate the idea that the slogan’s significance lies elsewhere than its content. Write an essay examining the slogan “Yes We Can” as a totem from Durkheim’s perspective. What are its characteristics? What effects does it have on collectivities and individuals? How does it have these effects? What is the relationship between these effects and society?

I can't wait to see the results...

there must be a pony in here somewhere

Sorting data kind of sucks.

I can't imagine a situation in which it doesn't suck. I can imagine gradations of suckiness, e.g., sorting bad data, or sorting someone else's data, or, worse, sorting someone else's bad data. (Yeah, I know who you are, and I sure as hell never envied you that particular job.) But even sorting your own data, even when you are pretty sure -- at least, some of the time -- that there are some amazing moments in your data, it's still a headache. Five and a half notebooks is like a migraine waiting to happen. I haven't even started on the recordings or my 'archive' (a nice name for the unorganized mass of paper and PDF documents I accumulated in Botswana).

I'm trying to meditate past the feelings and just look at the text. In other words, I'm trying to concentrate on what the texts I produced can describe and substantiate and not focus on the sinking feeling best expressed as: I was there for two-plus years and this is all I have? The only way to get past this point is work through the notebooks and recordings until I can see the dissertation.

My father used to tell a joke about a man who had two kids, one an ardent optimist and the other an equally ardent pessimist. He takes them to see a therapist. The therapist puts the pessimist in a room full of toys. The kid crawls into the corner and begins to cry. "Why are you crying?" asks the therapist. "There are all these wonderful toys and I know that if I touch them, I'll just break them..." the child sobs. The therapist hands the kid a kleenex, and tells him to try to relax for a bit.

Then the therapist walks the optimistic kid to a closed door and opens it. The room is full of horse shit. The therapist hands the kid a shovel and says, "OK, your job is to muck out this room." The kid takes the shovel and begins to shovel the manure enthusiastically, a big smile on face. "Why are you so happy?" asks the doctor. "Your brother gets to play in a room full of toys, and you're shoveling horse shit." "Yeah," the kid says, "but with all this horse shit, there must be a pony in here somewhere!!"

corporeality

I have been tending to my corporeality. In two days, I managed to tend to the wardrobe needs that arise in the frigid Midwest, get my hair cut and my eyebrows waxed, and hit up the Student Health Center. In order to remain registered at my graduate school, I have almost no option other than to continue to pay for health insurance, even when abroad. All the time I was in Botswana, I was shelling out for a health insurance plan I could hardly use because so much of the student health plan is focused on the SHC. Now that I'm back in close proximity to the SHC, I intend to take them for all they're worth.

I was surprised at how happy walking through a hospital made me. I was almost giddy. This has to be some weird post-field phenomenon. I wanted to stop and talk to people about infectious disease. I know I smiled when I walked past a sign about the family medicine program orientation. I quizzed my doctor about whether they used oral swabs to test for HIV. I quizzed the nurse about latent tuberculosis diagnostics. I really wanted to ask what the standard post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV was, but I also didn't want to annoy the people with needles in their hands.

I handed over some blood and urine, and got a flu shot and a ppd in return. I have ambivalent feelings about the possibility that I might have latent TB. If I have it, then that could mean nine months of isoniaizid. But part of me is intrigued by the possibility of having to deal with (and assiduously document) nine months of adherence to INH. Is that sick? I know this sounds like taking participant-observation too far, but it's not like I intentionally contracted TB just so I could experience treatment...

At any rate, we shall see soon enough. My appointment to have the little red splotch on my left arm examined is 9am tomorrow.

close encounters in the dairy aisle

By way of preliminaries, let me say that nothing Botswana inflicted on my skin can hold a candle to a Chicago winter. Ouch.

I'm sitting in my new room. I've managed to find my closet. I had hung maybe half a dozen things on hangers before I discovered the hangers were covered in a fine white dust. I took a break to wash the rest of the hangers. There's still clothing scattered around, and piles of electronic equipment and USB cables threaten to ensnare my ankles. But there's also a big furry black cat sleeping on my bed, so it ain't all bad.

I think there must have been a time when I felt some proficiency in procuring and preparing food, but it is long gone now. I was stable enough in 2007 to cook fairly regularly, though I never learned how to work the oven, and subletting made me somewhat sheepish about taking over the kitchen. I moved around so much in 2008, though, and spent so much time in borrowed quarters that I never really settled into a kitchen. All I really had were a few knives and a cutting board.

All this to say that when I ventured out for some groceries this afternoon, I was unprepared. I didn't really have a list; I just knew I wanted some food that wasn't already cooked. The store unnerved me. It's feels big, for one thing, and this store isn't even part of a major grocery chain. And even though I've been back for almost two months, the food is confusing. Where are the giant bags of mealie meal? Where are the boxes of UHT milk? Why must I buy a dozen eggs, rather than a half-dozen? Why is there half a wall of pasta sauce instead of a wall of tea? And why are there so damn many kinds of tea?

I did find some things I really like, such as tangerines and Greek-style yogurt, but I had forgotten that I'm starting from scratch again. I don't have cooking staples, like olive oil. No butter. No vinegar for salads. No curry sauce. No onions, no garlic. I got confused about what exactly I was going to cook. To be honest, I'm not sure what I eat (beyond tangerines and Greek-style yogurt).

On some kind of produce auto-pilot, I managed to find some broccoli, tomatoes, the aforementioned tangerines, apples and carrots. I found some whole-wheat pasta and the aforementioned yogurt, but by the time I was staring at eggs and bread and soy-based hot dogs, I was totally lost. If you are what you eat, it's pretty clear that I'm a walking identity crisis.

As I was staring at a selection of local baked goods, I suddenly recognized Mr K in the dairy aisle. Mr K is a graduate of my department. He wrote a paper notable for its challenge to a particular argument of a rather well-known scholar. I don't know what keeps him in the neighborhood. I've met him once; I wouldn't expect him to remember me. His name came to me almost instantly.

But it took me too long to sort of work up something to say, and I've haven't been in Chicago long enough to not be confused by who shows up in my environment. I was feeling like I had beamed in from Planet Meepzorp. I chickened out and got in line at the cashier next to him, rather than behind him.