Saturday, evening, chilly but not cold, slightly overcast, mid-October. This is basically a recipe for my feeling at home in the world. And I am following a recipe tonight--one for pumpkin coconut soup, which enhances the feeling. I am adding tofu and maybe almonds, and baking biscuits, for the potluck tonight. I have spent the afternoon updating ( Read more... )

Twenty-four hours ago, I was in lockdown on the top floor of my department when dawn came, finishing my third of four term papers. This actually wasn't much of a term paper--neither well-written, well-argued, nor remotely complete--and revealed too many of my personal demons, besides. This is why I can't sleep: I had meant to write a manifesto on ( Read more... )

1. From Zoltan Hajnal's Changing White Attitudes Toward Black Political Leadership, written over the course of 1995-2006:

"A black president, for example, would surely be seen as much more powerful than a black mayor and would therefore present an interesting and important test case."

That's on page 11. Where it gets really delightful is on page 134 ( Read more... )

I haven't left my house today and might not. That's OK, because there are peanut M&Ms here, and the Internet, and outside, there's no one in this town today, somehow, who I can sit and drink tea and be quiet with.

Thank God for the thunderstorms and the thick fog last night, because, you know, when your feelings are incongruous with the weather, ( Read more... )

My dog, Hobbes, turned thirteen years old today. In about sixteen hours, he’ll be dead.

We had read Angela’s Ashes for my memoir class. And I had some quibbles about its form; something about being annoyed that it was all in present tense, annoyed that it insisted on thrusting you into the immediacy of events long past. An easy, effective conceit ( Read more... )

I have plenty of quality time with the sidewalks of Providence, walking the mile from my house to campus and back multiple times a day--pacing up and down College Hill on the phone, jogging along the river (the river, the name of which I don't know and which my sense of mystery insists I don't want to know--and also my curiosity about how long the ( Read more... )

Last night at Tokyo on Wickenden for Lindsay's birthday, I ate some fried things. Tempura, which is a word that looks like it's going to be shampoo, or some kind of water filtration system, or maybe what my sweater is made out of. The result was that, after cancelling the rest of my Saturday evening to sit around in Friedman (the 25-decibel section ( Read more... )

I thought I'd use today to get caught up with my life. There are so many things I need to say to people, a person or two with whom not having had satisfactory conversations is really spiritually frustrating, plus the lingering couple of emails that want writing/answering/elaborating ( Read more... )

I'm going to start trying to update my livejournal more. I had the plan a while ago that I was going to try to post something, to have an artifact from each day of Obama's First Hundred. That ship sailed away with dreams of bipartisanship and my goal to get more sleep. New goal is thirty new entries by the end of the Hundred Days ( Read more... )

I haven't slept properly since Richard's cell phone went off at 4:15 in the Bible-black pre-dawn during the last hours of the second Bush administration. I almost haven't wanted to, because ordinary mornings are disappointing, now, and, after days of waking up in the company of the Gang of Four et al, also just a little lonely.

( the day my fists unclenched )