How it Feels

Since words have no place, this is an approximation of what it feels like to have completed and survived my first year of graduate school:





Wide open, expansive, free, overly pink like cotton candy and, yes, even a little fluffy.

I don't normally process or edit anything this...rosy, but it's what seemed the best at the moment. I could jump on a million trampolines for a million years, run a million miles, somersault down a million hills--fair enough, that sounds like a triathlon for people dressed in the latest trends in straight jackets--but it just feels pretty damn good. And I didn't screw up once!

The Chukchi Bible

Oh hey! I wrote a book review for my internship class and the Three Percent blog a few weeks ago of The Chukchi Bible by Yuri Rytkheu. I really enjoyed the mixture of memoir and folk tale, as well as learning a bit more about the lifestyle of Arctic and nomadic tribes. So until my final course paper is written and before I finaly get to a recap of the March cross-country road trop, here's an excerpt of my review-oriented ramblings:

"A bird flies around, takes a few shits, the shit turns into land and, voilà, the world is created.

That may sound like a summary of a terrible animated short or a 1970s acid trip, but it’s simply my poorly hyper-abridged version of one of many truly beautiful Chukchi folk tales that mark the beginning of time and man in Yuri Rytkheu’s The Chukchi Bible. Here’s the real version:

A raven was flying over an expanse. From time to time he slowed his flight and scattered his droppings. Wherever solid matter fell, a land mass appeared; wherever liquid fell became rivers and lakes, puddles and rivulets. Sometimes First Bird’s excrements mingled together, and this created the tundra marshes. The hardest of the Raven’s droppings served as the building blocks for scree slopes, mountains, and craggy cliffs.

There’s just something amazing about folk tales. I grew up with them as bedtime stories and have had a soft spot for them ever since, even preferring them to all things Disney. See, I find fairy tales lack that realistic nitty-gritty and hometown hero charm only a culture-specific folk tale can evoke. “Folk tales” focus on specific aspects of a culture, its values and history, whereas “fairy tales” are mostly about dwarves, princes hooking up with princesses, and evil queens getting tossed into canyons. While both forms of story telling are meant to entertain, folk tales are better in regard to educating and reminding us where we come from. And The Chukchi Bible has no shortage of heroes, culture, reality and that delicious nitty-gritty that makes stories like this all the more tangible."


The rest of the review can be found here. So far I'm 2/2 on reading and liking works published by Archipelago Books. I've got a couple more from them to start and hope I'll find them just as enjoyable.

A New State

Of being, of mind, of residence. However you slice it, this, my friends, is new.

The State of New York is proving to be an interesting place. The fact that the city I live in now is so close to the Canadian border takes the edge off of what I would refer to as "stereotypical New York angst", making people nicer, happier, helpful, more polite...

Basically, it makes them Minnesotan.

I'm hoping that once we get over the initial few days of receiving our syllabi and calendars for courses things will pick up in the world of academia. For now I wake up at 7 AM, an hour before my alarm goes off, and wonder what the hell I'm going to do with the 5-6 hours until it's time to catch a bus to campus. At some point I'm going to have to figure out how to get to a grocery store via the school's bus lines. And by "some point" I mean "preferably before I run out of food and starve to death". There are options for eats on campus, but I really don't think it's my style to pay $3.50 for a granola bar.

The graduate housing area I live in is nice enough. It's mostly foreign graduate students and graduate students with families and kids. And sometimes grandpas. I've seen at least one. So there are plenty of kids' toys and jungle-gyms and hey! a sandbox in the surrounding area. I will not get bored here.

I haven't met anyone living in my building, but have seen them many times and can say that I am most likely the only non-Asian person in it. In truth, most of the park seems to be inhabited by the Asian graduate student community. Which is fine, and sometimes hard to deal with, as around dinner time it's easy to catch tantalizing whiffs of noodles or pot dishes cooking in their apartments. I want to meet people and make friends, I suppose, but showing up at someone's door with a bowl and my own pair of chopsticks hardly seems the way to go about it.

Also, the eggs here are pure, snow white. And stick to the cartons and subsequently crack when you try to pry them off. Raw egg, it turns out, is rather hard to control and clean up.