Dylan in the Heart

For those who haven't heard, let me be the first to break the news: Bob Dylan has put out a Christmas album. Yes, that Bob Dylan. Yes, Christmas songs.

Seriously, I'm not even kidding, and if you know what's good for you, you'll find some samples of this album to listen to--Dylan's death rattle doing Christmas classics like "The Little Drummer Boy" and "I'll Be Home For Christmas" is not to be missed, even if the latter sounds a bit more like a threat than a promise, and songs like "The First Noel" sound like a clear challenge to Tom Waits, the former king of singing-as-a-continuous-low-growl. Oh, oh, oh, and your life is not complete if you haven't heard him croaking through the Latin lyrics to "Adeste Fideles," sounding for all the world like a child fake-speaking a foreign language.

So, Mr. Dylan, congratulations, and a strong showing indeed. And for Dylan fans like myself, I've got some ideas of other territories he could explore:

• He could make like a high school choir and try some madrigals! This album would feature songs like "My Bonnie Lass, She Ain't Goin' Nowhere" and, probably, would use the magic of recording technology to have Dylan sing the songs in full SATB parts: scratchy, amusical, tuneless, and bass.

• Along the same lines, for those who want to expose their kids to Dylan early, there's always the possibility of Tangled Up In Red, Yellow, and Blue, on which Dylan covers every from Barney to Raffi, perhaps with a side trip through the ABC's and the primary colors. Haven't you always wanted to hear Dylan sing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" in a round with himself?

• As CBS used to put it, "nobody sings Dylan like Dylan," to combat the Dylan covers which were all over the airwaves in the 60s. Well, it's time for Dylan to strike back and sing everyone else like Dylan! On Like the Rolling Stones, Dylan covers his favorite non-Dylan golden oldies, infusing them with his signature sandpaper vocals, leading to brilliant mash-ups like "A Hard Day's Night's A-Gonna Fall." Everyone will get satisfaction from these gems!

• Broadway, Broadway, Broadway! On Positively 42nd Street, fans can get 525,600 minutes of Dylan, as he covers everything from "Memories" (can't you just hear him caterwauling now?) to "Seasons of Love." Dylan as Andrew Lloyd Webber has always wanted to hear him!

• Remember that born-again phase in the 70s, when in songs like "Jokerman" and "Gotta Serve Somebody" Dylan seemed somewhat confused about whether he believed in Christ or had become Christ? Well, be confused no more: he believes in Christ, and so does the Mormon Tabernacle Choir! On their joint album, Just Like a Mormon, Brother Dylan drawls his way through "Come, Come Ye Saints," slower even than any church organist would take it, mumbles the words and butchers the to "Adam-ondi-Ahman," and gets "High on a Mountain Top," if you catch my drift. Though Dylan can hie to Kolob with the best of them, the real highlight of the album is their group rendition of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," because, really, why hasn't the MoTab recorded that already?

There you have it, folks: new Dylan albums to await. Pre-order them now, while supplies last, and remember: all proceeds go to charity!

Say cheese

In our fridge right now we have:

1 block fresh mozzarella cheese
2 tins crumbled feta cheese
1 tin crumbled goat cheese
1 block pepper jack
1 block paneer
1 block halloumi

plus the usual assortment of fresh vegetables--broccoli, cabbage, bell peppers, eggplant, zucchini, and carrots.

When did I start eating so well? Apparently I am now both in Berkeley and of Berkeley. Pondering this, I feel a strong urge to stock up on peanut butter M&Ms or candy corn just to balance out the disgusting foodsnobbishness of our fridge.

"Why couldn't I get THAT day over and over and over?"

I got married more than a month ago and I still have not posted any pictures. Clearly, I am a failure as a blogger. (Then again, I got arrested in Vietnam more than three months ago and I still have not posted any pictures of that either. I think that makes me a winner as a blogger.)

But wait no more! 9/19/09, to me, was just like that old song, you know, the one by the Dixie Cups: going to the chapel, and we're gonna get married...

By "chapel" I of course mean "temple."

The sky was blue (whoa whoa whoa):


And we'll never be lonely anymore:

****

There's not much to be said about the actual wedding ceremony--it was short and sweet, just us and our parents, we both remembered that the right answer is "yes" rather than "I do", and let's not go into how Mike giggled the whole time--so I'll move into the really good part, the reception. My mom was the wedding planner extraordinaire,

did I mention that I wore my mother's wedding dress?

and all I said I wanted from the party--this is true--is that I wanted to have fun. I've been to far too many weddings where the bride and groom stand in a receiving line, clearly not enjoying themselves, to want to repeat that for myself. And thank you, Mom, I had a blast. And how could I not? We held the party at a place that looks vaguely like the buildings on Tatooine:


It's a science museum, so in addition to having a great view

it had a wedding whale


a giant model of DNA


rock structures that can be shifted to replicate earthquake effects

cousins!

a stream that can be dammed up

and plenty of other fun toys.


And if that location weren't cool enough on its own, we added to it with flowers and saris


a gamelan troupe


tons of food, gathered from American, Korean, Indonesian, Arab, Indian, and Vietnamese restaurants, to represent the countries in which we've lived


and a dessert table that was almost buckling under its own weight.

And so we whiled away the afternoon, on that sunny September Saturday, singing


and dancing


and karate kicking


and hanging out with the cardboard cutout of my missionary brother


and being carried in chairs


and being tossed on a blanket.

***

Yes, friends, I had fun. To channel Bill Murray from Groundhog Day: That was a pretty good day.



[thanks to my cousin Margaret for the pictures]

That bwessed awangment, that dweam wifin a dweam...

I have been married now for one week and one day:

Saturday we got married. (More on that later.)

Sunday we explored Gualala and watched 30 Rock. (It's our couple hobby.)

Monday we drove California Highway 1 and opened wedding presents. (Not at the same time.)

Tuesday I got sick and spent the day on the couch moaning to myself about a headache and a backache and a runny nose and, of course, that pesky cough. (Two months and counting.)

Wednesday was business as usual. (What is usual?)

Thursday I flew to Utah. (Ain't nothin' like Provo in the fall.)

Friday I gave a paper at a conference. (So the school would pay for me to hang out with my old professors and Annie and Alea and Chrish and ke.)

Saturday I took the LSAT and flew back home. (All the cool dropouts go to law school, right?)

Sunday we went to church in our brand new married-folk ward. (Babies everywhere!)

***

"How's married life?" everyone asks me. (Hey, it's conversation.)

Well? I have no idea. I did a double-take this morning at church when someone asked me about my husband, I can't stop staring in wonder and confusion at the ring on my finger, and I probably spent more time this week without Mike than with him. But we had some nice phone conversations while I was in Utah, and when I got back he was waiting to pick me up. Is that what married life means? Not having to take public transportation home from the airport? I can learn to live with that.

"I'm usually more charismatic than this."

I've been telling myself, over the past few months, that a lot of the reason I wasn't blogging was that I didn't have much to say; all that was really going through my head, at any given time, was "I hate school I hate school" and "I love Mike I love Mike," and I figured neither of those were appropriate blogging topics, mostly in that they're so incredibly boring. (For the record, though: I hate school, but I love Mike. Also for the record, I've given up on finding a clever nickname for him; he may appear later as "Mister Whiskers," but for now his real name will do.) I told myself that after the Semester of Doom ended I would come up with witty repartee, interesting life events, or at least something other than SCHOOL MIKE SCHOOL MIKE SCHOOL MIKE.

So here we are, with the Semester of All Hell Breaking Loose safely behind us, and with only a Semester of Research Without Coursework ahead of us, and what do I have to say? WEDDING WEDDING WEDDING.

And that, my friends, is just not interesting. I'm not one of those brides consumed with details and The Perfect Wedding, Just This One Day For Me and Me Alone, and for the most part I've turned the planning over to my mother, who is doing a fabulous job, but there's still all these pesky little pre-wedding life tasks to be taken care of--we have to move to a shared apartment, for instance; we have to get marriage licenses and buy wedding bands and get special temple recommends and visit/meet his parents and book a hotel room for the honeymoon and buy him a suit and me a dress and figure out how on earth we're going to fit them into the tiny bedroom closet in our new apartment; we have to juggle work and school and wedding RSVPs and just plain spending time with each other, and, really, how do those Perfect Wedding brides handle it?

And so, instead of the interesting person I thought I'd become after all my papers were turned in, I've become, at the end of this summer, a counting machine, with all my thoughts focusing obsessively on various countdowns:

29 days until the wedding

Let me tell you about the honeymoon we almost planned: couch surfing. Hilarious, right? We also tossed around ideas like camping (too many pine needles), a human nest (too weird), and a yurt at a nudist colony (too many penises). We've settled on a cabin at a north coast resort, which sounds blessedly private, normal, and free of both pine needles and extraneous nude male bodies.

7 days until Mike gets back

Can you believe he's gone off backpacking with a month to go before the wedding? It was planned well before we got engaged, so the timing is just bad luck, but I suspect I might die without him, if not from missing him then from the stress of moving and furnishing our place by myself. I even had to buy our bed alone, which I secretly hope he hates, since that would be the perfect revenge. Mike, if you're reading this: an extra-soft mattress would be just what you deserve.

19 days of coughing

It's the freaking acoughalypse over here, as I've spent the last three weeks with a cough bad enough to keep me awake at night throwing up. I've drunk Robitussin by the gallon, kept cough drops in my mouth at all times, and even--this is big for me, since I distrust all medicines and medical professionals--visited a doctor. She listened to my cough, said, yup, that sounds nasty, and prescribed me an asthma inhaler. An inhaler! I'm not having trouble breathing, I'm having trouble breathing without coughing. The inhaler is, you may have guessed, not doing its job. I'm convinced and secretly hopeful that I picked up a case of tuberculosis while in Vietnam a few months ago, mostly because, come on, dying of consumption just before my wedding? Now that would be charismatic and interesting.

In Mother Russia, liftoff has YOU

In my two-month blogging hiatus (oops), I've acquired lots to write about: my trip to Vietnam for research and an exciting run-in with the police; my trip to New Hampshire for my father's 50th birthday "Half Century of Excellence" celebration; and my trip back to Berkeley where I think I've decided once and for all that I hate grad school and don't want to be an academic after all, though that may just be the summer classes speaking.

We'll save all that for later, though; for now, I'd like to present a quick quiz. Is this a picture of:


a. an advertising model for REI's outdoor gear?
b. one of Berkeley's many homeless people?
c. a young actor gunning for a role in an upcoming Grizzly Man/Into the Wild-style nature film?
d. the man I've decided to marry?

***

I offer a very simple prize for guessing the correct answer: an invite to the wedding, this fall, here in the Bay Area. For those of you who are shocked and appalled that my I-don't-know-what-to-call-him-because-I-hate-the-word-fiancé* has not been mentioned before on this blog, I apologize for nothing! I tend to keep quiet about my romantic life, at least on the internet, since I follow what I've heard referred to as the Soviet space program approach to dating: tell no one until you're sure the launch is successful. Only then can you rub it into the face of the evil capitalist pig-dogs.

(My affianced¹ takes this philosophy even more seriously: his parents didn't even know I existed until he called to tell them we were engaged, and likewise with his older sister, who still isn't quite sure this isn't all a giant joke. Way to start me off right with the in-laws, dude.)

Not that I've had to keep silent for too long: I've only known him since the end of January, when we met cute in Sunday School. (Cue chorus: awwwww, how righteous!) A mutual friend introduced us by telling me that my intended^a had voted against Prop 8; this surprised me, because I had previously assumed, based on his Scandinavian-heritage coloring, baby face, and habit of writing in Korean during Institute class, that he was boring, younger than me, and hyper-Mormon. My response to this new information, ever so charmingly, was "Oh, so you're interesting, then? Looks like I'll have to start talking to you."

I did, and he is, and I've been pretty much smitten since the first time we hung out--to watch Monty Python's Flying Circus, which I would say is the perfect geek date except for the fact that our first actual date was to a British-style pub in San Jose to see some friends of his dress up like pirates and sing sea shanties--when, in the short space of a single evening, he vehemently decried patriarchy and then teased me for being incompetent with the TV remote. My betrothed^# has lived up to the potential of those first few interactions, never failing to be interesting and never failing to treat me with equal parts respect and mockery. We're an odd pairing in some ways--my spouse-to-be^!, in the words of another mutual friend, "is the outdoors," and he's stated, on more than one occasion, that his love for me is conditional, depending on my willingness to take up long-distance backpacking, and you all can probably guess how I feel about that--but in most ways, all the important ways, we work, and it's obvious, and we're happy, and it's obvious. So there you have it, internet: we have liftoff, and so I can finally talk about him on my blog. Phew.

Oh, and in case you're wondering: T-minus two months until the wedding, and I'm serious about those invites.

***

*I think it has to do with negative memories of giggly 19 year old newly-engaged girls at BYU who couldn't stop saying "my fiancé this" and "my fiancé that." Shoot me if I ever turn into one of them.
¹This one is only better if you nasalize the proper vowel and sneer slightly.
^aMy intended what?
^#Three syllables, please.
^!This is getting awkward: now I'm just one of them, but with a better vocabulary. Maybe I should just start referring to him as a fiancé.

My syntax brings all the boys to the yard

I've written about this before, but May and December are the wackiest months of the year for a student, months that seem positively schizophrenic, as I spend the first half of the month frantically moving from paper to paper to paper, panicking all the while that I CAN’T FIND MY PEN I HAVEN’T EATEN IN SIXTEEN HOURS WHY CAN’T I GET THIS STUPID PAPER FINISHED I WILL NEVER FINISH IT AND I’LL BE FORCED TO DROP OUT AND LIVE ON THE STREETS AND DIIIIIIEEEEE, and then, suddenly, after clicking the last ‘print’ or ‘send’ button on the last paper, all the panic and stress drain out of me and I spend the rest of the month, I don't know, practicing my camera settings by stalking my mother’s dog (December), or going sailing, hiking, swimming, and picnicking (May).

(Though the post-semester relaxation may be a little harder to find this year, as I'm getting on a plane to Vietnam in precisely a week from today. Um, did I mention that I'm doing research in Vietnam this summer? It's going to be a total disaster. I can't wait.)

In any case, I just have one paper left to write until I am officially done with this rough beast of a semester is over, just one 25-page treatise on generative syntax standing between me and a master's degree. (That big, scary oral exam I was freaking out about? I passed, and, what's more, enjoyed it: I had so much fun that I actually asked for another question when my advisor said it was probably time to finish. Yes, I am a freak.)

I am currently delaying writing this paper, mostly because, after churning out three other 25-page papers in the last two weeks, mostly late at night/early in the morning, and sometimes in even odder situations, like on BART into the city so I could apply for a Vietnamese visa, or in a heavily air-conditioned Denny's in California's Central Valley, I have been reminded of the actual facts of my work style: I am, to put it succinctly, a procrastinatrix extraordinaire, and the panic about this paper that I need to motivate myself to write hasn't quite hit yet. Plus, I have hated this class so much, and suspect so deeply that the professor isn't reading my work, that I am tempted to write only a first page and a last page and fill the rest with 23 pages of open letters to my professor:

Dear L,

To be quite honest, I haven't understood a single part of this class since late January. To be even more honest, I'm not sure you have either.

Confusedly yours,

Hannah

or

Dear L,

You are such a bad teacher that you have made me disbelieve in your subfield. That's right, after taking your class, I don't even think syntax exists. Thanks a lot.

Nihilisticly yours,

Hannah

On the off chance that she will read or at least skim my paper, though, I'll refrain, and instead follow the pattern of the last three weeks, churning out rambly drivel in one long, panic-fueled session, typing terrible terrible introductions like "like Gaul, this paper has three parts," and "it is impossible to know," which, frankly, usually means "I don't feel like finding out." Plus, to fit the pattern I'll have to find some strange song to get hooked on: I wrote most of historical linguistics paper listening to the "Tabbouleh Song" on repeat, which means I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere in there are the lines "No we don't need hip hop, house, or trance / Cuz this song about a salad gonna make you shake your pants." And I'm putting the Tabbouleh Song first in the hopes that no one will continue reading to discover that my addicting song during my field methods paper was Kelis's Milkshake. Seriously, how embarrassing is that?

Back to work. And for anyone wondering how I can concentrate with loud techno/hiphop/rap playing--today's song du jour is DAM's Min Irhabi--let me just say: I can teach you, but I'd have to charge. And hey, given the usefulness of a master's in linguistics, that's just about my best money-making option these days.