Bachelorette of Arts

In seven days I will be a 2007 UCLA graduate.

Possible summer activities:

• learn how to translate (waiting to hear if I got in the class)
• travel to Italy to look at manuscripts in Roman archives (waiting to hear if I got the fellowship)
• learn ancient Greek (if the other two don't work out)

Definite summer activities:

• show Lauren, Katherine, and Jim around LA because they are all coming to visit at the same time!
• get back into playing tennis
• learn how to write a book review
• get my CA real estate license

Long term goals (within the next ten years):

• win the New Yorker caption test
• make lots of money and become really famous

Current Music: Verdi's La Forza del Destino - Ouverture

So NYU grad school decided to let me in two months after they rejected me. I didn't even read the whole letter. I skimmed it just to see if they mentioned funding. They didn't.

It doesn't bother me at all because I really like UCLA. Earlier in the year I was worried that I would have a horrible time with all the new relationships I'll have to build, but it seems pretty easy to stay out of trouble.

I like all my classes. I am disappointed that I don't have much time to work on a translation that I started in December, but it's just a personal project. The Italian Club will soon be in the hands of new officers, freeing me from some responsibility, and the weather is getting better every day.

So why is my camera sitting up in my closet? I am in a dry spell, I think, because my perception of colors and shapes is less magical. I guess my normal life is usually one of magical realism because I see lots of fantastical connections between little details during the day. But lately, life is just simple and unadorned.

The ASUCLA Bookstore is a dangerous place.

The Young Research Library has any title I could ever invent, organized on dusty shelves in dark corners. But the bookstore has all the best books pared down to what the faculty thinks we should be reading, all lined up in plastic wrapping, by department. So, of course, when I go there at the beginning of every quarter, I do some intense browsing.

I hit the Italian section first, knees bent for Machiavelli, tiptoes for Ariosto (or as Prof. Betti likes to say, l’Arrosto). Then I go to Comparative Literature– they always have way better stuff than the English department. I browse French, Greek, History, Iranian, and Latin, and then I go back to the c’s for Classics. There I always find new editions of stuff I can’t wait to read in the original. I run my fingers over the hardbacks and take time to observe the illustrations on the new paperback editions. Then I check to make sure that Roman Civics is still putting Plautus after Petronius.

A new one caught my eye in Classics this last time. I think it is what their graduate students have to read, and I hope Italian has something similar. It is What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain from NYU. It costs $21.95, and I bought it for two reasons:

• I'll be teaching college courses next year (!) and I'll need lots of help
• I wanted to see my judgments about my professors validated

(Wait, does the way we spell judgment bother anyone else?)

Now, after reading all 200 pages in exactly 24 hours, from Monday night to Tuesday night, I am applying the theories from Dr. Bain’s pedagogic study to my own college teachers. It turns out that I don’t have any bad ones this quarter. In fact, they are all probably the best! According to this book, one of the first steps that teachers should take when beginning a course is to extract some kind of contract or agreement from their students so they will actively decide to learn and participate. Today, one of my professors actually used the word agreement in the same context. That woke me up with some serious validation.

More importantly, though, the book taught me how to think about my own mental processes without becoming emotionally affected. It’s neat to be able to objectively observe myself learning. The Socratic method is most effective, and it even works without an ancient Greek geezer standing barefoot in front of me refuting everything I say. All it takes is disproving a micro-reality and fixing it with better information (these are my own words). No togas or Mount Olympus needed.

Here are my last classes before graduation:

1. Latin 3 – the last grammar class – Charlie Stein and Rob Groves
2. Italian 116B – Power & Imagination in the Renaissance - Franco Betti
3. Italian M158 – Women in Italian Culture - Lucia Re
4. Comp Lit 4AW – Antiquity to Middle Ages - Jeannine Murray-Romàn

Total Side Note: The only time that I ever saw Prof.ssa Adriana Chemello laugh was when I used metonymy incorrectly and pronounced it with a thick American accent. Unfortunately, since that day, my reality has been that I will never be able to learn rhetorical literary terms. Two days ago, I saw the title A Glossary of Literary Terms at the bottom of a handout for CompLit. I don't feel that way anymore.

Sizdah-Bedar 2007 in Irvine

Today, something like 65,000 Iranian-Americans lined the banks of a park in Irvine to celebrate the thirteenth day after Persian New Year, and I was there through most of it, sleeping on a blanket in the shade. All 65,000 of us had to pay at least $10 for parking.

A Persian grocery store (it's on Westwood Blvd. by UCLA) wished us all a happy new year via air message. It says, "Happy Norooz Jordan Market." Two years ago, Reza Pahlavi, Jr., the exiled prince himself, had the same idea. But his little plane said, "Happy Norooz Reza Pahlavi, Jr."

There were no kebabs for sale! People just brought their own meat. . . and teapots and Persian rugs and backgammon sets and desserts and fruits and cheese and nuts and rice and waterpipes and soccer balls and dogs that fit in purses. . .

. . . and almost every family had their own personal old school grandma with a scarf on her head. She's not mine, I just took a picture of her.

By the way, Wikipedia has pretty informative articles about the ancient Zorastrian-Persian traditions of celebrating Norooz (Norouz) and Sizdah-Bedar.

Thursday of Spring Break 2007

This is a cropped jpg from a centerpiece at a Persian New Year party that we attended.

1. THIS WEEK

AND IT'S GREAT TO BE BACK:

I didn't leave Los Angeles to see Georgia O'Keeffe's works in Santa Fe, and I didn't get ahead for next quarter. But I did finally hear from UCLA about graduate school funding! In a very encouraging letter, they offered me full registration and a teaching assistantship for the first four years! I am so fortunate that I have the possibility of achieving magister artium and philosophiae doctor without needing to work. I was ready to kick ass anyway, but now I know that I'll really be able to dedicate myself to reading so much that my prescription changes again.

As for accomplishments during Spring Break, I did wake up one morning and realize that my hair had gotten longer, which is an indication that I rested enough to catch up with reality. (Don't think Howard Hughes, it happens to the best of us.) I was finally able to be home to let the plumbers in, and I stopped drinking espresso so that I could zero my caffeine level to start from scratch on Monday.

2. LAST QUARTER

AND HERE'S TO MAINTAINING A GOOD GPA:

Yes, the caffeine statement sounded pretty strange, but I really did kill myself with work last quarter. I was taking five classes and making up an Incomplete, so my transcripts show that I took 26 units for Winter; the full-time minimum at UCLA is 12. I neglected my friends, or just forgot that they existed if they weren't in my face calling me all the time, and I took no pictures!

I wasn't able to do my best in any of the classes, and three of them were important ones for Italian. I never went to Latin, except to take the tests, because I was falling asleep during lecture and discussion. I was even enrolled in two classes that were held at the same time! At least twice I had to excuse myself to go to the restroom so that I could run to the other class to turn papers in, all of which were worse than the papers I wrote in high school. I did have time to do all the work, but my mind burned out early every day, and I had a hard time keeping up with even the simplest tasks. Thankfully, this quarter I am only taking four courses. If I can't keep up with 18 units, I'll know that I am truly an idiot.

3. THE NEIGHBORS DOWNSTAIRS

AND THIS IS NOT AN EXAGGERATION:

They are finally getting on my nerves. There are three of them: a heterosexual couple and the other guy. The couple often get into violent fights because she cheats on him. The whole complex knows, and they always fight at 3am, never earlier, never later. He is a 30ish tall and lanky man with long, greasy black hair, a big moustache, and bony elbows. He is in a band. She, the sometimes blonde sometimes redhead 20something, was his groupie. She has a fat, cream pug and drives an old, cream Volvo sedan with expired tags.

The "other guy" is a very small sleazy guy who also seems to be unemployed. He is not in the band, and he's the one who likes to hang upside-down in his closet until he gets high off of the blood rushing to his head. (He told me this when I asked him if he was shirtless and abnormally red because of intense sunburn.) He asked me to be his Valentine. I said no.

They are finally getting on my nerves after ten months of living in this complex because of their music. Every night from 8pm to 3am, they play their records. The sound filters up through the floor boards and makes the dust rattle. Often it is country music, but I have ever heard a song repeated. Several times, when I've come home late myelf, I've looked in their windows to see the party. There is no party. They just sit, alone, on their couch with the television off and stare into space. Maybe tomorrow night I will find something heavy and sturdy to beat on the floor - no, wait - tomorrow is Friday. They, and everyone else, are entitled to listen to music in a non-festive way on Fridays.