Though I can't quite pinpoint why, I'm anxious for this week to be over.

In class, grad school is relatively easy. Slightly more people talk, and what they say tends to be more intelligent, but otherwise I'd say it's indistinguishable from Lawrence. It's the assignments that get me. I've decided to put tomorrow's homework off for an hour or two while I sit back and watch some tv.

And eat some warm goo, courtesy of foodblog Simple Recipes. Note for the uninitiated: if left unattended, simmering milk will form a skin and attempt to lift itself out of the pan with a giant makeshift balloon.

I was going to write an angsty post about how I still can't decide which course to take, but in laying out my options I realized which course I don't want to take. I'll have to run it by my advisor to be sure, but here's the tentative schedule:

Mondays and Wednesdays:
Culture and Politics

Tuesday and Thursdays:
Foundations of Interpretive Theory
Writing Biography

I hope that looks impressive enough. Even after I spent four years at Lawrence my dad is still puzzled by the term system; I always have to convince him that I'm not slacking off by taking three classes. I think I could handle four courses — the runner-up course, "Criticism: Art/Artist/Audience," while impressive-sounding, didn't seem at all difficult (which is perhaps why it was lousy with undergraduates) — but I'm too cheap to pay for an extra course and I've still got no idea what the workload is going to be.

I keep hearing people pronouncing it "ahngst," like the German word Angst. I'm sure the words are related, but our twangy "angst" is a different bird, and these German pronounciations just confuse me.

"Angst" was the name of Brain's musical. Not Angst.

"Writing Biography" scares me to death. It's partially a creative writing course, which means I'm going to have to write biography. Not autobiography. Biography. And here's another shocking twist: I have to write about someone I'm interested in, someone who I think other people would be interested in reading about.

Of course, how am I supposed to empathize with people who read biographies? It's hard to imagine what they would like. Vaseline on toast. Cutting themselves.

I'm taking "Writing Biography" for a number of very good reasons. Foremost among them: I've been assured that we'll be dealing with the nitty gritty details of rhetoric and narrative, subjects which have to huddle in classes like this as long as Literary Theory stalks the land. And I'm all about rhetoric and narrative right now.

Vague plans for a master's thesis.

Yikes. I have to go to sleep now, errands to run, two more green pills to take in the morning. A job interview in the afternoon, maybe.

In today's episode, Our Bold Hero takes an online politics test:

You are a Social Liberal (65% permissive) and an... Economic Conservative (60% permissive) You are best described as a: Centrist

I love it when the Internet confirms my own sense of self. I've taken a politics test with a rudimentary version of this graph before, but even though the results were roughly the same, I like the snazzy political zones on this one much better.

Hat tip to my socialist buddy for the link.

I'm trying to be a better blogger, and I will be, just as soon as I stop thinking that how often I publish is more important than the quality of my posts. For those of you with the same problem, here's a test: if you had no blog, would you bother to tell anyone what you just posted? If you wouldn't, why not?

This is just my roundabout way of saying that Bill's Beth is kicking my ass when it comes to good blogging. She's found that happy medium between my daily updates on television shows I'm watching and her husband's complete refusal to post. The unpredictability of their joint blog is yet another reason you should get an RSS reader and stop manually checking webpages every day.

Subscribe to their feed here.

And what have I been up to, you ask?

I'm finishing up week two of our intensive grad school prep course — real classes start next week and no thanks to Lawrence's uncooperative registrar (hard copy signature required) I've finally turned in all the requisite paperwork. I signed up for courses yesterday after a longish chat with campus writing guru Prof. McEnerney.

There are some prejudices I need to overcome, and this time I'm not talking about my general dislike of Californians and Carletonites. For one thing, and this is going to take me a while to accept: the classes with weird names, in departments ending with "studies" no less, are of more use on my transcript than an old-fashioned survey course.

At least if I want to go to a Ph.D. program later, and for now I'd like to keep that option open. McEnerney talked a lot about the "conversation" — the kind of things academics are studying and publishing on right now — and which classes will give me the tools I'll need to participate.

So classes like the ridiculously vague "Phonographic Fictions: Literature & Sound" or the ridiculously narrow "Machiavelli and the Arthashastra," if they approach the problem through contemporary critical theory, are better than good solid upstanding survey courses. And from what I'm hearing, these classes are difficult, not the sort of wishy-washy blow-off stuff we all made fun of at LU.

This then, is what Prof. Dintenfass meant when he said this master's program would be my way of finding out if I have the stomach for a Ph.D. program. But I can't help thinking: if I don't like it and end up doing something else, then who will teach tomorrow's college students Our Bold Hero's literary tastes?

I'll write about the courses I'm in when it's clear that I can take them.

Yesterday was also the first day of my UChicago research study. I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to disclose, since all the forms I read covered my privacy, but the gist of it is that they're looking at different genetic responses to over-the-counter or FDA-approved drug(s). There are four visits lasting from nine until one in the afternoon, with about an hour and a half of downtime for reading, watching movies, etc. I only get $160 for my trouble, but I don't really have to do anything besides take entertaining tests, so I think it's a good deal.

Whatever was in those two green pills (I get to find out at the end of the study — my official guess was "stimulant/appetite suppressant," my second-guess is "alcohol"), it was great. I felt incredibly calm and affable. Thoughts seemed to come easier even if I wasn't doing better on the tests. In the downtime I read Faulkner's "The Bear" and wondered why I'd never gone deer hunting. Proof enough that I wasn't on the placebo.

As I'd assured my parents, the drug's effects wore off before the session was over. I also took home $16 I'd earned in the decision-making game, an advance from my $160. I rule at the decision-making game, though I'm still not convinced the results aren't random. I'm doing three sessions next week to finish out the experiment.

And finally, I'm still looking for an on-campus job, preferably a research assistantship. (You wouldn't happen to have one, would you? Because that would be great!) In the meantime I've already found one job, albeit with negligible hours: starting tomorrow I'm the biweekly distribution guy for the UChicago Chronicle. We'll soon see if I'm better at delivering papers than Jubb.

Though it doesn't affect me much (I've quickly gone from reading every editorial to scanning for columns by John Tierney and Alan's beloved but repetitive Thomas Friedman), I hear that the New York Times is moving some of its op/ed columns behind a pay wall. Matt Welch at Reason captured the essence of the situation.

Everyone (even "Daily Kos," which won't let me link to individual posts) is mentioning that some paying bloggers will probably paste the entirety of most columns onto their webpages, solving the problem for us cheapos. I agree with that forecast, but at the same time I'm slightly annoyed:

One of the main characters in my abandoned attempt at a cyberpunk story ran a website called "Norm's Annotated NYT," and though I still find the idea amusing, I can't help but notice that it's now glaringly unoriginal.

I keep watching "Battlestar Gallatica" — the new series, not the old one — against my better judgment. But here's why you shouldn't watch it:

Gaius, one of the major characters, is incredibly annoying. This show isn't like "Lost," where you can usually understand the actions of characters you don't agree with (in fact, "Lost" is at its best when it lets us see through even the doc's white knight act). Gaius' motivations are inexplicable.

He's a genius, a celebrity, and a womanizer, yet he rarely comes off as any of those. Instead, he chats with his imaginary Cylon girlfriend and flopsweats his way through the episode's given crisis. Often a crisis he created through his monumental cowardice. I think we're supposed to sympathize with him, but I can't do that. I can't even pity him; with the backstory they've given him he should be capable of being more than a sniveling incompetent.

But I can't hate him either, he's no villain. So I just get annoyed.

The whole show, at least for the first season, seemed to revolve around secrets that characters were keeping for each other. Gaius is the worst offender, but even some of the good characters kept secrets long after a rational person would have stepped back and considered the dangers involved.

Come to think of it, the entire series has an anti-intellectual subtext.

Anyways, if you want a good live-action drama with a bit of a twist, try "Lost," "Firefly," or "Twin Peaks." In the spirit of smarter tv-watching, I've added "watch less tv" to my 43 Things.

I was going to write something about how Blogger's new Blog Search feature is a little scary, but the Technorati search engine is already both scarier and better.

I don't think I'm the only blogger who grants strangers and friends full access to his blog but limits the clues that acquaintances, would-be employers, and certain relatives can use to find it. Most of us try to avoid what Graham, in one of his less successful coinages, once called "blogburn" — suffering in real life for something on your weblog. It's just common sense these days.

To that end, I'm happy to note that my knowing my full name isn't sufficient information to find this blog in Blog Search or Technorati. Our Bold Hero took steps long ago.

Still, I find it somewhat scary (and a little cool) that I can type in something like "Lawrentian" and find all (or most) of the Lawrence-related blogs. Or, god help us all: anyone could type in "MAPH" and read what the bloggers in our program are saying.

I'm resisting the urge to read them (for now) as that sounds a bit creepy, but I can see from the results that they're out there.

Yet another reminder of the utility of nicknames. I wonder if I'm not trying to hold onto the illusion of "internet privacy" when I sacrificed it long ago.

Yesterday at our weekly MAPH social hour (all the booze your tuition money can buy), I was delighted to discover that many of the students in my preceptor group aren't fond of certain trends in modern literature. Jonathan Safran Foer and — most important for my purposes — the dreadful Dave Eggers were mentioned.

Finally, a university where the people with decent taste are the majority. Or, at least, the vocal minority. There was much playa-hating.

I had to be careful, of course, because with so many English geeks about you take a chance everytime you mention a book. I dislike Dickens (it's phase two here, I'm told) and my faint praise was not kindly received. Thank god and Evelyn Waugh that Little Dorrit is so proverbially awful or I wouldn't have had a graceful way out of that.

Mostly though it was people critizing the same genre or work or author for different but related reasons. Moby Dick and Infinite Jest, two books I've put off reading for surprisingly similar reasons, were both recommended to me.

Oh, and we talked the varieties of drunkeness that accompany certain liquors, a subject I find all-too-fascinating.

Thankfully, except for Raymond Carver, my favorite authors seem to be largely unknown to the students here. A few people have read bits of Murakami, which is good because the shorter stuff is better anyways. Amazingly, I have met no one who knows about Chicago native Joseph Epstein, my favorite essayist.

I say "people," and there was a rotating crowd of people discussing literature in what most observers would (falsely?) consider a pretentious way, but one person stood out in particular. I think I've found our Hegelian. Even the way she professed to dislike New Yorker fiction while reading it obsessively anyways was dead on.

Now, unlike some of the people I knew at Lawrence, I never came to dislike the Hegelian. Maybe it was our shared academic interests, or maybe it was simply that I never thought she was taking herself quite so seriously. In any case, even though the Hegelian was a bit intense at times, ultimately, in that big interdepartmental battle royale I spent four years imagining, I always ended up on her side. If I could make any of my fantasies into a movie...

I'm reminded of that time in the VR when she stormed in and asked me, snarkily, if I ever wrote about her on my little blog. At least one of us must have been drunk, because the whole situation was hilarious.

Apparently I haven't offended anybody quite yet. I'd thought that the B section of our preceptor group hated me for my boorish behavior on Monday, but I had a nice chat with a few of them on the way home. Ended up splitting a goat-cheese and olive pizza with two of them, even.

I did somehow get myself into an embarassing conversation where I somehow ended up pointing out a dangling modifier in one girl's essay, but she took it well and it was obvious I'd been tricked... somehow... into acting like the geeky copy editor I am.

Anyways, it's pretty odd to be among so many people who, if not English geeks themselves, are at least fellow travelers. It's still possible that this is all in my head, of course, and I'll have to play a game of Illuminati (my new litmus test) before passing final judgment on any of these people — but assuming I can find a group to hang out without outside of the designated social hours, this could be an interesting year.

So now that I have DSL I'm still thinking of getting SkypeOut, but it looks like I missed my chance to get a SkypeIn number in the Brainerd area. By, like, a day?

I was waiting to find out if the 206-**** numbers they were offering would be a local call from B-town (after talking to people at Brainerd's local telephone company, I still don't know) before I purchased the number. But it looks like I waited too long.

The list of available area codes seemed much longer when I looked at it the day before Skype was purchased by eBay. Certainly (218) was still available, and I was able to generate several dozen possible phone numbers while looking for one that appealed to me. And now they're suddenly gone, and I've gotten no response from Skype as to why.

Could that many phone numbers in central Minnesota — not to mention the area codes I had to scroll through to get to 218 (the list now starts on 219) &mdash really have sold so quickly? I doubt it, unless news of the merger generated some sort of unprecedented sales volume.

An unannounced change in policy, then? I can't find any acknowledgement of the change on the Skype website. The best laid plans...

I got up at 9:30 this morning and I've only now had a chance to settle down.

Class started today: the MAPH colloquium, our ungraded introduction to graduate school. I'd had a meeting with my faculty advisor this morning, then I had to rush back home to get the printer cord from the mailman and print out my materials for class. The lock for my bike arrived today as well, so even after a few paper jams I was only a minute late for the opening lecture.

100-odd students and no air conditioning, but then I was near the window so I shouldn't complain.

Our colloquium topic is New York City in the 1840s, which certainly came out of nowhere. After the lecture (the first tag-teamed lecture I've attended, though I've listened to Prof. Goldgar mock the format often enough) we met for another hour and a half with our small groups.

My small group seems nice enough, like a freshman studies class basically. We played a name game for about ten minutes and I realized about five minutes in that I'd met two of my classmates at the MAPH dinner the night before.

I've used "seems nice enough" so often lately that I'm thinking of verbing the acroynm to save time. My small group snees. The dinner, now that I think of it, was pretty fun. There were even nebulous plans to hang out later hovering about. Also, the food was incredible after all this cooking for myself.

Anyways, the guy who's playing schoolmarm to our little group, known as our "preceptor," had some good advice to offer. This program sounds like a lot of work...

I thought I'd taken to heart his point about how most grad students have to train themselves to shut up and listen, but I was dismayed to realize at the end of the class period that I'd talked more than anybody. I suspect, from some vague talk I overheard on the way out, that I alienated two or three of my classmates insodoing. A wonderful hole to spend the rest of the week digging myself out of.

On the bike ride home I ran into Celine and Half Moon totally out of nowhere. I'd heard that sooner or later you're bound to run into a Lawrentian in Chicago, but frankly I wasn't expecting to. Celine has sort of a knack for improbable encounters, I've heard, but I'm still shocked to find her living a block and half away.

So we'll, I dunno, do something sometime. Perhaps wipe away the remaining awkwardness from the last time we did something by ourselves?

My DSL packet came in the mail today too, as I discovered once I finally got back to the apartment. Another miracle! Basically I have nothing left to look forward to this week, except homework and endless tv programs.

Dinner last night was ice cream. Ice cream and a few odds and ends as I remained hungry. Incidentally, the last of the red wine is gone. Recipe:

Red wine sauce
Boil 1 cup sugar in 1/2 cup water for at least five minutes. Remove from heat.
Stir in 1/4 cup wine and 1/2 teaspoon grated orange or lemon peel.
Serve hot over delicious vanilla ice cream.

I need to buy malt powder. The ice cream was a confidence booster of sorts for last night's activity: meeting other MAPHiosi at a local bar. I was going to wait until the big orientation on Sunday, but the guy who organized this signed his email with "Prost," always a good sign, and, well, we all know I'm an alcoholic.

So many people wondered about "Prost" but didn't look it up. Disappointing.

The main obstacle was the presence of Californians. I've just never liked people from California, especially southern California. Call it prejudice, because it is prejudice.

I'm not sure quite why. It could be because all my least favorite authors live there, or because the Californians I have met, like the West-Coaster in Freiburg, tend to confirm my preconceptions. Maybe it's their unflattering representation in various movies and t.v. shows?

Anyways, I talked to one guy from Berkeley, who time may reveal as a blowhard (he's a big Pynchon fan who's read all the big books redeemable for hipster cred), and he seemed nice enough. So maybe this is progress.

The rest of the MAPH students, and there were about a dozen there, were surprisingly friendly. Except when I was talking (listening mainly) to the aforementioned Californian, conversations tended to revolve around the predictable getting-to-know-you topics.

The majority of us seem to be English majors, with a few Art History and Philosophy types thrown in, and most of us got the big envelope of doom simultaneously rejecting us from the Ph.D. program and accepting us to the MA program. There are quite a few Midwesterners, but most of the states are at least represented. Most of us are coming right from college but there were a few people who'd spent a year or two doing other stuff (one girl already had her MFA). A lot of us seem to have studied abroad, most of us live near 55th street or south of there.

There are a smattering of people from the area, former UChicago undergraduates and such, and I gleaned a bit of local knowledge. Apparently there are only about four bars near UChicago (thanks to prohibition-era religious reformers) and people really do shop at the Co-Op, a supermarket with deplorably high prices ($3.49 for milk?). There's a book co-op somewhere that I'm determined to check out.

(The Woodlawn Tap, by the by, has much cheaper prices than I'd expected in Chicago: $2.50 for a Miller Lite, $2.75 for Leinie's.)

For my part, I explained my penny-pinching DSL arrangement (roughly $25/month for phone and high speed internet) and some people seemed to be interested. After great effort I had turned off most of the critical voices inside my head, so it's anyone's guess if people were patronizing me.

I was generally pretty talkative and slightly ridiculous, but I'm giving my classmates credit (in the past generally not a good policy) to be in on the joke. I was (characteristically?) forthright and cynical, but with the exception of the Californian, to whom I admitted my prejudice outright, I don't think I offended anyone.

Well, unless that one girl is Japanese and not, as I assumed, Korean, in which case I think I committed some sort of hate crime by mentioning the hallway incident at our '40s 40s party.

Yeah, I'll try to be a bit more sedate next time, Sunday. Try to learn as much about the other maphiosi as I'm giving away about meself. But I think it was a success, as far as introductions go. Though speaking of which, I wonder how many names I'll remember?

So I'm beginning to realize that there's only so much I can do with red wine. I bought a bottle of cheap "table wine," a label I erroneously assumed was indicative of higher quality, last week to cook my famous pan-seared venison. I haven't tried the "cooking wine" at the grocery store so I don't know if paying double the price if actually worth it; suffice it to say that I didn't think so when I walked into the liquor store, but now I have a whole bottle to get rid of.

Suddenly my mom's advice — only cook with a wine you would drink — seems prescient. I tried having a glass with the last of the venison steak but it tasted like the cheap merlot it so definitely is and I ended up pouring half of it into the sink.

And the bottle is still in the fridge. The cork is cool, I should point out. I prefer the new plastic corks to the old wooden ones, which seem like more of a hastle. In Freiburg there were rumors that the Germans had a special drop-off for recycling old wooden corks, which wouldn't surprise me really — though as far as I know no one ever found it.

I got the Joy of Cooking in the mail today, and though I have to report that cooking has advanced since 1975, there was some good advice on cooking with wine. So tonight I stirred a 1/4 cup of red wine into my beef stew after it was done cooking, with tasty results.

Still, I have about two or three cups left in the fridge, and I'm running out of options, people.

So I'm really into "Twin Peaks," in a sort of why-god-did-I-delete-all-but-two-episodes-before-watching-any-of-them sort of way. So far I can't find any libraries with the DVDs, and the VCR on my TV-VCR combo isn't up to the task. But this can be a long-term project.

Ditched Stranger in a Strange Land and moved on to my Faulkner anthology, though I've been too enamoured of my computer lately to do much in the way of reading. Trying to download old episodes of "Law and Order" on a 56k, and failing.

I seem to recall reading a good short story by Heinlein at some point, but this book, supposedly one of his best, got real irritating after about 200 otherwise promising pages. I scoffed at Jubb earlier this summer when he said he wasn't enjoying the ending, but now I understand.

If I want some author's theories about life shoved down my throat this transparently (ah yes, transparent shoving...), I'll read Ayn Rand. Angel characters in books are about as subtle as monkey characters in movies.

I exempt the "Preacher" comic book series from this criticism. I just finished reading all of them and was quite impressed. A little better than "The Watchmen," though as good as "Sandman." Read "Sandman" before you die.

I should be going to museums instead of reading comics and re-watching Simpsons episodes, but I've trapped myself at home for the next week. Even after shipping most stuff is cheaper online, and I've got three or four packages coming for me this week. Sometimes I forget exactly what I've ordered.

I have to sign for all of these, of course, which means waiting for the postman. In the past he's come as early as 10 and as late as 5, usually the latter. So I'll be a bit of a shut-in (though I've got an important interview on Thursday: money! yes!) for a while. A perfect time to watch "Twin Peaks," but noooo, I needed hard drive space.

So, thanks to my dad's penchant for hunting, Amazon's "Search Inside This Book" function, and Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, I just had easily the best non-dessert meal I've ever made: Pan-Seared Venison with Red Wine Sauce.

I took a picture to prove it, and since I've got plenty of bandwidth I've decided to post it. I'm very sorry if these giant gobs of meat in what looks very much like blood seem a little disgusting, but they were very delicious.





The recipe also included tarragon. Am I the only one who gets excited when using a spice for the first time? I felt just like Marge in that one episode of The Simpsons: "Oooo, I've always wanted to use rosemary in something!"

I bought a used bike yesterday from a pawn shop. Probably not the best place to get one but I was loathe to take two trains into town and walk seven blocks to get to the Play It Again Sports.

Part of my justification for going out to this pawn shop (which occasioned my first bus ride in Chicago) was that I suspect my old bike has already been sold to such an establishment, and a half dozen phone calls that morning had narrowed my list of nearby pawn shops selling bikes to two: A-Ashland Pawners & Jewelers and EZ Pawn Inc.

Pawn shops names always sound so sleazy...

Indeed, I'm mildly suspicious that my bike was on sale in the first place I visited. They had a Rockhopper with a white seat from a different bike, and purple handlebars from yet another bike. Covered with stickers, too. Of course, I can't prove anything without a serial number, and I wasn't about to pay $90 for such a monstrosity.

Yeah, I don't trust pawn shops. Probably having my bike stolen has made me paranoid — I know my dad went characteristically overboard after it was pinched — and I've become too suspicious of the cityfolk around me. Or maybe my new stance is justified, even healthy in a neighborhood where an unattended bike can get stolen in ten minutes.

Have I given too much credit to strangers? It's not like this is the first time I've been robbed: my CD case was definitely stolen, as were a few pairs of sunglasses — and as inexplicable as it is I have no other explanation for the disappearance of my first AP stylebook. Maybe my trust for the general public is too high.

Certainly B-town — where I rarely locked my car doors and once went so far as to unwittingly leave a giant Mickey Mouse keychain on the dashboard (the keychain was stolen) — gave me unrealistic expectations for the world at large. Or my luck in B-town, anyways.

(I wouldn't trust anyone from Southeast Brainerd, mind you, but I'd always considered those jerks the exception.)

I don't want to be that guy, of course. No sense being paranoid if you can't be full-out crazy paranoid, and my landlord won't let me install four deadbolts. But I resent having to put my guard up; hopefully after a week or two without incident I'll put all of this behind me and become oblivious again.