I saw Harry Potter

Here are some thoughts about it. (spoilers, probably, but just a little)

1. Best part = short animated story sequence. You probably knew I was going to say that, because of how I am such a nerd for clever animation. But seriously:


2. I don't know how they let that suspenseful waiting-for-a-snake-to-leap-at-you scene go on for SO LONG and still somehow managed to scare everybody when it happened. I actually started to get really frustrated, like, come on, guys, I know that snake is going to jump out, this is starting to get ridiculous, any more and it's going to ruin the suspAAAUGHHH! I think I looked like I was having some kind of a seizure when that happened.

3. Sometime since the last movie Dobby went right into the uncanny valley. And this is me saying this, me with my robot fascination and tendency to stare blankly into space. My uncanny valley is very small, but apparently there is room for Dobby. I think they must have subtly adjusted his proportions. Compare:



It's always the mouth that turns it unsettling for me. Like those robotic heads that move around, but as soon as they start talking they just look like they're gnawing on something. The person who finally figures out how to do a CGI character whose mouth seals properly when they close it will either be my hero or take things to a whole new level of subtle creepiness.

it's a cornucopia of love

Well I hope all of you had a good Thanksgiving/food day/rare opportunity to use the word "pilgrims." This was my first EVER Thanksgiving not spent somewhere within a mile of my parents' house, so that was kind of weird, but we made up for it with a Smith-sponsored foodstravaganza.

I was originally going to make "Grandaddy Rolls," aka my grandfather's recipe which has appeared at every family gathering at for at least as long as I have been alive, but in an odd turn of events I ended up with a host family who doesn't have an oven. While I personally would argue that this is impossible, I have seen the evidence, and I guess that's one of the differences between French and American cooking - it is apparently possible here to go your whole life without ever needing to bake or roast anything. Huh.

This posed a bit of a problem for me, as my main area of food expertise is bread products, and the rest of my diet could essentially be made over a campfire in the wilderness or picked directly off of plants. But you can't come to a dinner and be like, "I have PLUMS!" No, I needed civilized food. With a recipe.

So, as anyone would do in such a time of need, I turned to The Internest.

My starting point was this: peppers, onions, chick peas, various spices, and... an oven. So not exactly a possible choice. But I am all for adaptation, so I set out to turn this into something I could work with.

First, I left out the chick peas, because there was definitely going to be enough protein in everyone's lives at this point (side note: just before the dinner started, three people were required to carry the turkey across the Boulevard Montparnasse). I decided it would be possible to just do it in a large pan on the stove. And I wanted there to be carrots in it, because, I don't know, it's Thanksgiving, and you need carrots. At this point I ran into problems because I have no idea how to convert from standard to metric measurements, so when I asked Lorraine for advice and was told to buy a kilo of carrots, this wasn't exactly as informative as she intended.

"That sounds like a lot of carrots," I said.

"Well, the carrots are the most important part of the recipe, aren't they?"

"Not really. The carrots aren't actually in the recipe. I just added them."

I get the idea she is the kind of person who follows the recipe religiously. I am not. I proceeded to measure all the spices with my fingers.

In the end it turned out fine. I ate the rest of it for lunch yesterday.

a confession

I have no idea what Benoit Mandelbrot looked like...


...but even if I go look up a picture of him, which I will probably do after posting this, I will never be able to imagine him as anything other than a rotund bald man with stubby arms and a smaller version of himself sitting on his head.

slightly morbid thoughts that I have on a regular basis:

"If a car hit me right now and they had to go through my stuff to figure out who I am, what would they find and what kind of mental image would they get of me while I was unconscious?"

Well, let's see.

Carrying: one painting, rolled, in acrylic on brown craft paper, depicting a person being splashed by a large wave.

In pockets: two brass buttons (fell off the coat unexpectedly today), keys with flash drive, receipt for bottle of turpentine, bank card, metro map, napkin, 3.71 euros, Schoko-Bons candy wrapper, folded paper reminding me to check to see if I'm dreaming (unsuccessful, I consistently forget about it and so I never have it while actually dreaming).

In purse: cell phone, hand sanitizer, two pink rubber bands, 20 centimes, green pen, Navigo metro pass, photocopy of passport and visa (at least I know I'd be identified quickly), half-written letter (english) in envelope addressed to my cousin, wallet.

In wallet: receipt for various paints, 1.79 euros, Sorbonne student ID, Reid Hall ID, Louvre card, coupon for 10% off at the Galeries Lafayette.

In backpack: inhaler, ipod (no headphones), candy (same as the wrapper), red pen, nail file, paper palette, large empty plastic bag, recycled paper cahier containing art history notes, plastic bag containing jelly jar containing turpentine, plastic bag containing paints brushes palette knife linseed oil pencil and eraser, plastic bag containing six clementines, black pen, black fine-point drawing pen, hairtie (oh hey I've been looking for that), bunny-shaped pencil case containing three pencils and an eraser, digital recorder containing lectures from various classes.

Okay, for this I think you could reasonably conclude that:

1. I have too many pens and need to stop carrying them all around; it's unnecessary
2. I am a huge art nerd (particularly on wednesdays)
3. I really like clementines (true, but I do have a good reason to be carrying those)
4. I am highly flammable and it's a wonder I didn't spontaneously combust when that hypothetical car hit me

Is this a reasonable impression of me? I have no idea.

a summary of my recent life...

...in the form of a list of

Things I Like:

1. clementines
2. kiwis
3. oil paints
4. seeing mice run around on the metro tracks sometimes
5. the picture of the pink bunny telling you not to shut your fingers in the metro doors
6. speculoos cookies
7. knitting mittens
8. walking around in the rain
9. this plaid shirt
10. fencing with the dude who has done it before and so just spends the whole time being clever and beating me terribly
11. my wool coat, which is pleasantly waterproof to a surprising degree
12. cooking
13. the end of World War II, which, among other positive aspects, gives me a day off this week
14. remembering that tests have been postponed for a week because the professor forgot about vacations

creation by elimination

Austin Kleon is a person who writes poems out of newspapers and makes me miss my high school creative writing class. We actually might have done this once. But things like this, or the magazine collage poems we did whenever we had spare time, were some of my favorite things I did in that class. I guess maybe it's easier to write when you can pretend it's not you doing it and you're really just finding it already there?


Either way, I think I should try doing some of these with those free newspapers floating around the metro. There's also a tumblr for submitting your own poems and a book which I kind of want to buy for myself and about half of the people I know. But it would be weird to get everybody the same thing for Christmas, probably.

Related, and found through the above: A Humument, which I also want, and which is also on the internest for you to look at.

knitten a mitten

To entertain myself over the break I started knitting some mittens! You know, for my freezing icicle hands that I have pretty much all year. This is the first one - notice the thumb hole, of which I am really proud (this is my first project with digits). The second one is going to reverse the colors, so the yellow will be the background and the red the more design-ish part. Too bad I'm not in Gryffindor.

The pattern I used is the Ruba'iyat Mittens, which is super awesome and can be found here if you use Ravelry, but I'm not sure how to find it otherwise.

the hypothetical party

omeday I'm going to have a party and the theme will be "Mount Olympus." It will be similar to a toga party, in that there will be togas, but it will also be held on the roof of the tallest available building, where we will look down over the edges and talk about the people we see walking around down there.

Everything will be served out of large ceramic pots (which I suspect I will have to make for the occasion, and will probably then send home with the guests because one can only use so many giant ceramic pots), and we will sit on sheepskins and tapestries, and some people, I'm not sure who, will be playing instruments and singing some epic tales. Also, I will be disappointed if at least one person doesn't grow a really serious beard for the occasion.

adventures in consumption: persimmon

ne thing that I don't exactly share with the French is their food philosophy. They treat it as if it were a science, which I guess is what happens when you've been accumulating food rules. And there are a lot of rules, both spoken and unspoken - a baguette must have a particular weight, you use butter to stick the cheese to your bread, beer and not wine is had with Chinese food. They are Serious about their food. Every meal is an elaborate ordeal.

I'm all for elaborate food alchemy, but as it turns out, when left to my own devices - such as being allowed to feed myself for a weekend - I default to the diet of some kind of wandering nomad peasant. That is to say that two or three of my meals per day tend to consist of some combination of bread, cheese, yogurt, and fruit. Every once in a while Philippe comes home, looks in the refrigerator, and says, "There's nothing gone from here, what did you eat for the past two days?" And, judging by his reaction, "Mainly apples and cheese" is not a satisfactory answer.

The truth is I just really like bread, cheese, yogurt and fruit, and as I've mentioned here before, the fruit selection in Paris is too good not to take advantage of. So today, despite it being a holiday and therefore all of the stores being closed, I went out on a mission: I was going to buy a persimmon.

I'd never had a persimmon, with the possible exception of some persimmon pudding someone brought me at school once, so I didn't actually know if I liked them or not. Actually, I had never actually seen a persimmon, even though they grow in the southern US so I could probably find one around Maryland if I looked hard enough. Also whenever I asked anyone if they had even had one, the only stories they had were unpleasant ones. But still! No one becomes a fruit-eating champion by avoiding things that sound bad, and I am determined to succeed in the area of fruit-eating.

So I put on my new boots and went out, confident that I would be able to find the one produce stand open on a mysterious religious holiday. And, lo and behold, there it was, and I purchased my persimmon, which is "kaki" in French, or whatever language they borrowed that from, and which was a lovely red-orange and bruised under the gentle force of me trying to pick it up, which I took as a good sign. And I took it home and cut the end off with my Swiss army knife, because I am kind of a boy scout. And I hesitated for a second and thought, "How am I supposed to do this? Whatever, I'm just going to eat this with my hands like a savage beast," and proceeded to do so.

Now here is the only way that I can describe this persimmon: Imagine that you have a peach or something, the kind of fruit that's slightly fibrous inside but gets softer and softer as it matures. And then imagine that you take this peach and just leave it out to ripen far beyond the recommended time, but instead of turning into brown mush it just keep getting riper and riper until it is softer and sweeter than any peach imaginable, and at some point it will reach the peach singularity and transcend into a freakish level of fruit...ness. And that is what a properly ripe persimmon is like.

It was soft and pulpy, like I could have eaten it even if I was a baby or a toothless old person, and ridiculously sweet. Eventually I became so covered in juice I abandoned my original plan and used a spoon to scoop the inside right out of the skin. (I have heard of people putting these in the freezer and then eating the frozen slush out of them, which sounds delicious.) I should have taken a picture of it, because it was a terribly pretty fruit, but by the time I thought of it I was covered in slippery yellow pulp and felt like I had just eaten several spoonfuls of sugar.

So that is the story of the first time I had a persimmon.

adventures in consumption: boots

On Saturday I took a Step in my Life and bought some new boots. My other black boots started to fall apart last year (though I kept on wearing them, and just avoided puddles or particularly sandy places) and now my green tennis shoes are headed in the same direction (though I continue to wear those too, and am determined to do so until the soles wear through or detach from the rest of them). In general I was in dire need of some really good walking shoes, so I found the Doc Marten's store in Paris and went to find some boots.


Actually, I went about a week ago, but they were out of my size so I had to come back later.

They are extremely comfortable, even though they rubbed holes in the backs of my feet the first time I wore them because they were laced funny and I wasn't wearing proper socks. Whenever I wear them I look at my reflection in shop windows - which I tend to do anyway - because I wonder if they make my feet look disproportionately large. But it seems fine to me.