Last year when I came to London, I stayed in a closet-sized London School of Economics dorm room.  It was…fine.  It was fine.  The shared bathrooms were fine.  The lack of internet was fine.  The tour groups of Italian teenagers who I was sharing the bathrooms with were fine.  The lack of kitchen facilities was fine.  The tiny beds were fine.  It was all fine.  But it wasn’t good.   (The free breakfast, though, that was pretty good.)

If I were to really level with you, I would admit that I think I actually started to go crazy in my little tiny room after a while.  The trip was really fun and productive, but there were a lot of…long dark nights of the soul, mostly dissertation-related, that I think were probably exacerbated by living in a closet.

Now I am staying in a nice, big studio apartment in the attic of a nice old Georgian townhouse, and I have a kitchen and my own bathroom and it’s not even outrageously expensive (with the exchange rate, it’s probably costing me around what my rent is in LA, which probably is outrageously expensive, but in my LA-tainted mind, it’s totally reasonable).  It is good.  It is really really good.

Here is the view of the city on a sunny day that I can see from the window at the back of my apartment:

and here is my temporary Room of One’s Own.  I love:  The high ceilings, the big windows (these were taken at night, so you can’t see how bright it gets in here), and the tiny, miniature oven.

I was feeling all cranky yesterday because, well, because I hate dealing with people who are just plain mean-spirited and awful, and I had to deal with a mean-spirited awful person, and I was mad about it because it was related to a thing that I was hoping would just stay in LA and not bother me here.  I am not good at dealing with these kinds of things because I end up internalizing a lot of anger, and I’m uncomfortable communicating that anger because, I always second guess my own feelings and can never admit that they are valid.  And I also have a lot of anxiety about how people will react to me when I say what I think.  So that is to say, I end up spending a lot of time drafting fantasy angry emails that I never send.  So I was doing this yesterday, in my head, and then I realized that I was

a) sitting having a coffee at Ray’s Jazz Cafe, which is located in Foyle’s bookstore, which is a lovely place,

b) about to go see an off-West End show,

c) in fucking London, doing whatever the fuck I wanted,

and that maybe being angry was a waste of my energy.

And then I saw a play, and it was good and made me glad.  And then I got home and discovered thatRaffi made a song out of Jack Layton’s letter to Canada, and even though I am typically averse to sentiment or even admitting that I have feelings (see above), it made me cry.  And I was like, you’re right, Jack, what am I even doing.  Sitting around feeling impotently angry is always a silly idea.

Also, I think I am giving myself a repetitive strain injury from sitting in the library too much, so I guess that means that tomorrow I have to shopping on the Portobello Road instead.  TOO BAD FOR YOU, library.

And last week I was part of a panel discussion at Cal State LA that was entirely about Lady Gaga.  It was really excellent – the room was packed and the audience were mostly undergraduates who were so involved and engaged and interested that it has somewhat renewed my faith in the fact that Children Are Our Future.  Also, I am getting paid for having done this? For speaking on a panel about Lady Gaga and having a lovely time?  Which I think means I just won at musicology?

And this weekend is the Echo conference, which my friend Jill and I are running!  And it will be excellent.  There is a  paper about GWAR.  That is reason enough to go to a conference, frankly.  And then once the conference is over on Saturday night, all of the Major Stressful Events of the quarter will be over and done with, and therefore I am spending Sunday at an amusement park.

And my efforts of the past few months, which involved applying to every single travel fellowship for which I am eligible, have finally begun to pay off!  I have accumulated several nice little pockets of money that will hopefully pay for another research trip to England.

And right now I am watching a documentary about Phyllis Diller.  She is quite an inspiring lady.  Did you know that she is a keyboard virtuoso?  Did you know that she is a painter?  Did you know that she has all of her gags and one-liners written on index cards, cross-referenced and filed in a giant card catalog?  I aspire to such heights of organizational skill.  Also, she invented hat boxes that are see-through so you can see what hats are in them.

Anyhow:  Lest anyone fear that I have abandoned my forays into mid-century cuisine, never fear!  Indeed, I have a backlog of tasty treats (and also one very unfortunate treat) to tell you all about!  These include:

Lemon Fluff!  (Delightful!)

Avocado Mousse!  (Slimy and slightly abject!)

Burnt Sugar Cake!  (Wonderful!)

Chili Sauce Meringue Meatloaf! (Someone wrote a recipe using madlibs!)

I find myself clinging to this time at home in a weirdly desperate way.  I need it and I want it, and it’s so painful sometimes that I can’t have more of it.  Have I ever told you about how sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and start panicking because I can’t remember the last time I talked to my mother, only to realize that I’d talked to her earlier that evening because we always talk on the phone on Sundays and Thursdays?  So very many times.  And it’s funny because I know that I’m not that much further away from my family than my LA friends who have their families on the east coast, but somehow the physical reality of border-crossing makes it seem further, or at least gives it an added level of anxiety.

But I’m here now, and it’s good.  My littlest sister seems impressively maturer and is going to be a graphic designer and told me all about her typography class, which makes me slighly sad that I never went to design school (which was something that was on the table for me, once upon a time).  My other sister, well, she lives with my parents still, and just got  a pug puppy, which manages to both be cute and to look an awful lot like a weird, deformed guinea pig at the same time.

I spent a week in Toronto visiting people and seeing faces and, sadly, grading, but mostly the time was happy and refreshing.  I miss my friends and I miss living in a city that feels close-knit.  I love LA, but sometimes its distances exhaust me.

I spent two days with my grandmother in London, who had me out shoveling out her driveway at 10:00 at night, which reminded me that I am allergic to winter.  Also, we had an excellent chat about booze, which went as follows:

“I read in the German magazine that you should soak raisins in gin and eat ten a day for arthritis.  And I bought gin and it was so expensive!  $16 for such a small bottle!”

“That seems about par for the course for gin, though.  What kind did you get?”

“Oh, some Mexican kind.”

“They don’t make gin in Mexico.  This is Sauza.  This is tequila.”

“Really?  Well, I’m sure it will do the same thing.”

“I don’t know about that.  Gin is made out of juniper berries.  Tequila is made out of a cactus.”

And that is the story of why my grandmother has a jar of raisins soaking in tequlia on her kitchen counter.

We’re heading up to the frozen wilds of Northern Ontario on the 23rd, and until then I am reading lots fiction and doing research on Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello and teen idols that I am actually going to get paid for.  Dreams really do come true!

Also, I have figured out how to make Christmukkah into Dinosaur Day, but more on that later.

So anyhow, constantly having to justify my existence has naturally resulted in a minor existential crisis.  The thing is, I know why I am in gradute school.  I am getting a Ph.D. because, fuck y’all, I want to.  I really like to research and I really like to write, and I really like to teach, and one day, UCLA came along and offered to give me money for doing those things, which is a pretty sweet deal.  The question remains, however, of what I will do with myself when I am done.  Ideally, I would like an academic job somewhere.  Ideally.  But we all know how totally crappy the academic job market ALWAYS is, so I am a realist, and I know that I might end up doing something else, and I am really totally ok with that, because I know that while academia is what I am doing right now, it isn’t what I have to do with the rest of my life because there are lots of other things I could do.

I know that.

But because everybody asks me what I am going to do when I’m done, and because I don’t really know what I’m going to do when I’m done, I was kind of freaking out.  I was freaking out until I told Tanya about how I was freaking out, and then Tanya said the most useful thing anybody has ever said to me.  She said that when I’m done I should just Do Whatever the Fuck I Want.

And it was like a light went on!  I can do whatever the fuck I want!  I have no children, I have no husband, I have no house, and while Some People might see that as a bad thing, it is actually totally awesome, because it means that whenever I want, I can just drop everything and Do Whatever the Fuck I Want with my life.  It’s weird because sometimes I feel like I should be establishing some kind of nest somewhere, but I don’t really want to, because I have more important things to do.

So I am going to do it.  I am going to pursue my dream of becoming a Great Woman of Letters (a job title that I have invented that means Whatever the Fuck I Want it To Mean).

First, though, I do have things to deal with right now, namely the problems of I Don’t Know Who My Dissertation Advisor Will Be And Maybe I Should Make Up My Mind About That, and also I Just Sent My First Ever Article Manuscript Out to a Journal and Am Consequently Filled With Self-Doubt, but I’m sure those things will resolve themselves somehow.

*What would Barbarella do?

2.  A long-overdue story:

Last Friday, VV and I went on a nautical tour of Koreatown.  Koreatown is kind of impenetrable at the best of times, and when you try to apply a boat theme to it, it just becomes ridiculous.  We began our adventure at Cafe Jack, LA’s one and only Titanic (as in, Titanic, the movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio)-themed restaurant, I hope.  And also, it is in a big fake boat.  And they serve tea and coffee and sushi (we had the Jack and Rose Roll) and weird fusion food, compelling presented via a poorly translated menu with no English descriptions.  We ordered the pizza cutlet, because who doesn’t want to know what a pizza cutlet is?  Boring people, that’s who.  It turns out a pizza cutlet is a chicken cutlet . . . fried, breaded, and covered in pizza toppings. (I was disappointed because I was expecting a slice of pizza wrapped in meat.)   We chose not to order the skewer fish cake pod, because there are only two words in that name that are actually edible things, and they are not two things that really should be eaten together.

From there, we went to the Brown Derby.  The Brown Derby was that famous restaurant shaped like a hat that all the old Hollywood stars went to, only now, the original site of the Derby has been made into a mini mall.  However, in the interests of historical preservation or of madness, the Derby itself was not demolished, but placed atop the mini mall, like a crown, and now it houses a bar called The Red, where I ordered a gin and tonic and was given a gin and club soda.

And then we went to the HMS Bounty.  A nautical bar full of old people, with signs on wall that say things like “Happy 100th Birthday Doris.”  It was WONDERFUL.

And then, as part of my research project on boys, we watched The Big Lebowski, which, it turns out, is even less sensical and more impenetrable than Koreatown.  (Like, seriously you guys, can someone explain to me why every straight boy loves this movie?  I even asked my most trusted straight boy colleague and he couldn’t satisfactorily explain it.)

3.  I have a cold.  It keeps migrating to various parts of my body.  I wish it would leave my chest, and go to, like, my knee, or something.

4.  Friday I start my MA exams.  I am using them as an excuse to order lots of takeout.

2.  Remember last time I wrote a blog post and I was all like “I’m going to start giving a word of the week every week!”  Well, I actually meant it.  This week’s word is PENGUIN.  Once upon a time a few weeks ago, my friends and I were watching The Terror of Tiny Town, a 1938 film that happens to be the world’s first musical Western with an all-midget cast.  (I know, right?) So, anyhow, there was this one scene where they were at the neighbourhood tonsorial parlour and then all of a sudden the action stopped, there was an inexplicable shot of a penguin, and then the action resumed again.  And we were all like “WHY WAS THERE THAT PENGUIN?”  “I DON’T KNOW.”  Thus, the “penguin” of the movie is the thing that happens in the movie that stops the action for a period of time and does not serve to advance the plot at all.  Sam has correctly identified the Barbara Striesand Walks Down the Stairs in a Fancy Dress and Sings a Song scene as the penguin of Hello, Dolly.  Sam wins this week’s vocabulary quiz, and he didn’t even know he was playing.

3.  I have some thoughts about Lady Gaga but they are far to complex to reveal right now.  I must let this percolate.  I know you are dying to know what I think of Lady Gaga.

4.  Los Angeles would be better if everything currently named “Beverly” (Beverly Hills, Beverly Glen, Beverly Blvd., The Beverly Center, Beverly Crusher, etc.) was renamed “CTHULHU.”  Are you worried about zombies?  Stop worrying about zombies.  WORRY ABOUT CTHULHU INSTEAD.

I am celebrating International Be 17 Years Old Day by wearing black eyeliner and listening to Weezer!

Amy is celebrating International Be 17 Years Old Day by dressing all in black and reading Camus!

Tanya is celebrating International Be 17 Years Old Day by having pizza and a chocolate bar for lunch and then instant messaging all afternoon with her boyfriend instead of working!

OTHER SUGGESTED WAYS TO CELEBRATE INTERNATIONAL BE 17 YEARS OLD DAY*:

1.  Write a shitty poem and publish it in your high school newspaper!

2.  Learn to play the bass guitar!

3.  Spend your lunch hour in the art room!

4.  Pass driver’s ed!

5.  Stay up until 1 AM on Friday so you can watch The Wedge!

6.  Watch Ghost World for the 19th consecutive time!

7.  Read an Anne Rice novel!

8.  Discover Sonic Youth, have mind blown!

9.  Play hide-and-seek at the Walmart!

10.  Be jealous of all those kids who aren’t virgins!

11.  Sit alone in your room and cry!

WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO CELEBRATE INTERNATIONAL BE 17 DAY??

*All actual things I did at age 17 while my peers were binge-drinking in the forest.

2.  Dear American Cinematheque:  Thank you for having a Valentine’s day double bill of Baz Luhrmann films about how if you fall in love, things become horrible and then you die (poison or the consumption, your choice), which is basically consistent with my worldview these days.

3.  Remember in Anne of Green Gables when Ruby Gillis had the consumption and everybody talked about how beautiful it made her and I was eleven years old and had never heard of the consumption before and didn’t know what Lucy Maud was talking about?  Actually, I think it was in Anne of the Island.  Anyhow, I think of Ruby Gillis every time someone dies of the consumption.

4.  So Sam and I are doing this thing where we are only going to eat fresh fruits and vegetables for an entire week (STOP LAUGHING AT ME, I KNOW YOU’RE LAUGHING AT ME) because we think it will make us feel better and healthier, and I am personally hoping it makes me feel less depressed as fuck all the time.  So basically we are having a week without carbs and dairy and unnecessary sugar.  So, of course, today I went to Cafe Audrey to drink tea and grade midterms and this dude sits at the table beside me and proceeds to consume (and I am not even kidding) buttered bread with french fries on it.  “Would you like a fry?” he said.  “No thanks,” I replied, and my heart wept, for my heart loves carbs.

5.  This is mostly of interest to Tanya:  Apparently there is this goth bar in Downtown LA that has mod night on Thursdays?  So, like mod goth night?  Or goth mod night?  It sounds…important.

6.  Because of a conversation I had today, I’ve been thinking a lot about these things and these things, and about how I don’t understand the impulse to lie and to hurt people. It’s frustrating.  It’s even more frustrating when people just get away with it.

7.  Because of the Oscars (seriously) my bus stop up near the Egyptian was moved from its normal, well-lit corner to a sketchy, scary corner.  Please join me in boycotting the Academy Awards to protest this injustice (not that I was going to watch them anyhow).

8.  I am 25 years old and I have never owned my own car and this realization makes me feel kind of inadequate, even though I don’t even want a car.  What I really want is, like,  a unicorn.

9.  This is my 600th blog post!  Only 66 more until I have the blog of the beast.  I think I will celebrate that momentous occasion by drinking red wine out of a teacup and then falling asleep in front of a rerun of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

But anyhow.  On to more important things, like…

DJ mixing class!  So great.  It is me and Shelina and a bunch of 18-year-old boys who needed to be told that the term “mix tape: comes from “cassette tape” which were these things we used to record stuff onto back in the 1990s.  Golly.  This week I am going to mix The Shangri-Las with MC Lyte and it is going to be super awesome.  Also, today I picked up a record of horror movie sound effects (including:  Arm Chopped Off, Sawing Leg Off, Grave Digging (In Stoney Ground), Grave Digging (In Wet Ground), Eerie Wind, Weird Wind, Wind Howling in Ship’s Rigging, and, inexplicably, The Electronic Swamp), which clearly means that I am going to be named Most Likely to Succeed by my DJ School Yearbook.

And now bedtime, for a have a long day ahead of me tomorrow in which I will read that entire Paul Gilroy book and think of lots of intelligent things to say about it for my meeting on Wednesday.

Oh, hey, also:  someone is finally starting a Fringe Festival in Los Angeles!  Which means that I might finally have a venue for this one-woman show I am working on (as of this morning) about how shitty everything is!  Tanya is my Associate Producer.  WE’LL SEE YOU AT THE TONY AWARDS!!!!!

2. Masters’ exams in the spring because they are scary,

3. What if there is no money for the Echo conference because all of the money in the world has vanished (see: “economic crisis”),

4. Dying in an earthquake because I live in California.

Luckily, in a week and a half, I will be in HAWAII! I will be in Hawaii where I will be presenting two papers. On the same panel. I have been put on a panel with myself.  But luckily the Xandra Show is on the first day and then I am going to spend the rest of the conference sitting around in my leopard-spotted bathing suit, making unreasonable demands of cabana boys.