Miscellaneous (just before office hours)

If you have an hour to spare – and the attention to go with it – I’d strongly recommend checking out this episode of This American Life: #355, The Giant Pool of Money (the podcast is free). This episode details the sub-prime mortgage crisis and its effects, from the top of the chain at wall street to the admittedly unscrupulous borrower and his 540K NINA (no income/no asset verification) loan. If you’re wondering precisely what happened and/or why it is so difficult to borrow money nowadays, this highly informative and (frankly) riveting hour of radio is for you. Trust me – as someone who found macro and microecon fairly boring in college, I was surprised at just how compelling this show was. 

AV and I are preparing to leave for our long vacation at 4:30am on Sunday morning. I can’t tell you how excited I am about that 4:30 start (the “Vartabedian Start,” as it is known here, named for the egregious hour at which my husband’s family would depart from NY for vacation in North Carolina – not always 4:30 but always TOO EARLY). The first week of the trip will be spent at the Toronto Summer Seminar, where we’ll be spending an entire week studying Plato’s Gorgias and (according to reports) see jazz in the evenings. AV will join, but will spend most of the week exploring Toronto – it’s exciting, particularly since neither of us have been there. My young adult jaunts to the land of (some of ) my ancestors only went as far east as Thunder Bay, ON. Ontario is also the site of my first run-in with Pentecostals. As an adolescent baptist, I was – shall we say – unnerved. 

On the 15th we travel to New York to spend a few days with the New York folks, and then leave on the 25th to Tulum, MEX to celebrate Mimi and Cheche’s 30th wedding anniversary with the Colorado folks. I think it will be hot, but I’m planning to play volleyball, run for shelter, and read Moby Dick. 

I should mention that – as usual – our trip to NY will involve a visit to The Stone. On June 19th I will get to see HANDS DOWN my favorite musician working today – the bassist William Parker. The night before (Lord willing), we will see the drums virtuoso Yoshida Tatsuya. Last night we went and saw a very straight ahead big band, and both of us remarked how shrill the big band was. That says a lot, considering our penchant for honking saxophones and forest noises. I’m so excited to see Wm Parker and Yoshida I can barely contain. Holy crap. 

45 Minutes from now, AV and I will have been married for six years. We count two anniversaries – the anniversary of our first date (eight years ago) and then wedding. Here’s something that started as a post and ended as an appreciation of AV. 

Unequivocally the greatest eight/six years of my life. I’m a grateful (and lucky) girl.

Almost Unnoticed (Almost)

I’ve arrived home early from school tonight. On Mondays I typically have class from 4pm to 8:30pm, but as the semester is winding down the class meetings get shorter. This seems to be true of teaching and learning (except in Logic class, where every stinking moment working with Modus Ponens and Constructive Dilemmas counts).

As I was driving home this evening it occurred to me that tonight I sat in the last official classes of this second Masters degree. Even though six thesis hours await me, the only classrooms I’ll be sitting in for awhile are ones I’m teaching. Funny that it almost escaped my notice. I know I’m not quite *done,* but the idea that there are no classes for me to go to in the fall, no schedule to squeeze the last available minutes out of … but somehow I’ll still be paying money. That’s kind of a drag.

In high school I was a part of the Pascal Center for Independent Study – for some people it was two hours of study hall or two hours of pretending to work. I learned how to direct my time and energy toward a project or two that was interesting to me. Unfortunately, one of these projects was bad (really bad) poetry. The evidence remains buried. I’ll need to call on that drive and energy, the commitment to a single goal because the thesis work starts in earnest over the summer. I have no idea what comes after that, but I’ve decided it wise to focus on one big project at a time. This is a revelation to reforming muli-taskers like myself.

As I get older, though, I find my brain can only hang onto one project. The rest is mush.