Kaleidoscopic

I’m Shocked, Shocked

luolin88 — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:00:56 +0000

OK, I’m not that surprised that the IRS is auditing our 2005 return. But if they think the medical expenses that year were too high, I can’t wait till they see the itemized deductions for 2006 (two ivf/pgd cycles instead of just one).

Adorable

luolin88 — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:07:52 +0000

A recent gift of clothes for Zebediah included a tag with an announcement of a “Most Adorable” baby contest.

I briefly considered sending in a photo. After all, he is adorable, and a free trip to New York City would be nice. I think some of his hand-me-downs were B.T. Kids brand, so I might even have a photo of him in the brand somewhere.

Keep in mind that I think beauty contests are silly, and infant/child ones even more so. A photo contest doesn’t seem as bad, but one prize is a photo shoot and appearance in a magazine ad, so it would still be a bit stage-motherish. Not to mention introducing the kid to modeling, a career not known for contributing to mental and physical health.

I can only conclude that either motherhood has warped my mind even more than I thought, or I have been living in the South too long.

Unread

luolin88 — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 05:50:34 +0000

I saw this meme at Jody’s. I’ve got a catalog for Zebediah at Library Thing, but I haven’t used the unread tag myself.

The rules, from Penguin Unearthed.

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded [or were bookclub choices that you never read that month]. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Below is the unread list as of June 20, 12:33 am. It’s got 200 books at this point. This is the raw ranking. The numbers in parentheses give an idea of how the weighted ranking differs.

Most often tagged unread

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (247/9444)
Anna Karenina (Oprah’s Book Club) by Leo Tolstoy (226/9473)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Oprah’s Book Club) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (205/12682)
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (189/11300)
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (174/11434)
The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien (173/9291)
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (166/12830)
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (163/7073)
The Odyssey by Homer (152/11522)
Ulysses by James Joyce (147/6557)
War and peace by Leo Tolstoy (144/6332)
The Name of the Rose: including Postscript to the Name of… by Umberto Eco (142/8219)
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (140/14617)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (140/7546)
Life of Pi by Yann Martel (139/13325)
Madame Bovary (Oxford World’s Classics) by Gustave Flaubert (137/6628 )
Jane Eyre (Penguin Classics) by Charlotte Bronte (132/14514)
A Tale of Two Cities (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens (131/7820)
The Iliad by Homer (130/9178 )
Moby Dick by Herman Melville (129/8161)
Pride and Prejudice (Bantam Classics) by Jane Austen (125/19673)
Emma by Jane Austen (125/9654)
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (121/12019)
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (120/5070)
Vanity Fair (Penguin Classics) by William Makepeace Thackeray (119/4006)
The Canterbury Tales (Penguin Classics) by Geoffrey Chaucer (119/6869)
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (119/7601)
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (116/6824)
Great Expectations (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens (114/9065)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (113/7868 )
The Grapes of Wrath (Centennial Edition) by John Steinbeck (112/8276)
American Gods: A Novel by Neil Gaiman (111/10857)
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco (109/5945)
Dracula by Bram Stoker (109/7282)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (108/6730)
Sense and Sensibility (Penguin Classics) by Jane Austen (108/9126)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (106/6310)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (105/13062)
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (105/9644)
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (105/12194)
Middlemarch (Penguin Classics) by George Eliot (105/4384)
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (104/6316)
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi (102/4633)
Middlesex: A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides (102/9393)
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (102/5271)
Mansfield Park (Penguin Classics) by Jane Austen (101/5663)
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (101/5869)
Dune by Frank Herbert (100/9701)
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel (Perennial Classics) by Barbara Kingsolver (99/7858 )
Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1) by Neal Stephenson (99/4262)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Penguin Classics) by Alexandre Dumas (98/5528 )
The Inferno by Dante Alighieri (97/6184)
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman (97/6868 )
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire (96/9380)
The Once and Future King by T. H. White (96/4486)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics) by James Joyce (96/6935)
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (94/6168 )
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)… by Oscar Wilde (94/7634)
The Satanic Verses: A Novel (Bestselling Backlist) by Salman Rushdie (94/3405)
The three musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (94/4362)
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (93/6609)
Persuasion (Penguin Classics) by Jane Austen (91/6895)
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (91/7074)
Gulliver’s travels by Jonathan Swift (91/5125)
The Corrections: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen (91/5303)
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (90/4922)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Penguin Classics) by Thomas Hardy (89/4993)
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (88/6382)
Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan (88/7586)
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (87/5809)
Oliver Twist (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens (86/4667)
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (86/4693)
Beloved by Toni Morrison (85/5852)
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Anonymous (85/6655)
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (85/4186)
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (85/8215)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (85/6210)
Dubliners by James Joyce (83/5836)
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (83/6723)
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (83/5769)
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt (83/6740)
Les Misérables (Signet Classics) by Victor Hugo (81/4906)
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Signet Classics) by Victor Hugo (81/2672)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into… by Robert M. Pirsig (79/5883)
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (79/4537)
A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway (78/5422)
The Road (Oprah’s Book Club) by Cormac McCarthy (78/5662)
A Confederacy of Dunces (Evergreen Book) by John Kennedy Toole (77/6371)
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (76/4938 )
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond (76/4071)
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (75/3974)
The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley (75/5638 )
Possession: A Romance by A.S. Byatt (75/4330)
Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (75/3308 )
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence (75/3354)
Northanger Abbey (Modern Library Classics) by Jane Austen (75/4802)
The Book Thief (Readers Circle) by Markus Zusak (75/4018 )
The Aeneid (Penguin Classics) by Virgil (75/5335)
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (74/3502)
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (73/3710)
Bleak House (Modern Library Classics) by Charles Dickens (73/3313)
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (73/4566)
Candide (Dover Thrift Editions) by Voltaire (72/5348 )
Sons and Lovers (Modern Library Classics) by D.H. Lawrence (71/2706)
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (71/2225)
East of Eden by John Steinbeck (71/5423)
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (70/2221)
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (70/4393)
Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (70/4804)
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (70/3417)
The War of the Worlds (Modern Library Classics) by H. G. Wells (69/3262)
The Plague by Albert Camus (69/4853)
The Origin Of Species by Charles Darwin (68/2846)
Underworld: A Novel by Don DeLillo (68/2751)
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (68/3848 )
People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present… by Howard Zinn (68/3994)
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (67/3572)
Jude the Obscure (Penguin Classics) by Thomas Hardy (67/3090)
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (67/4353)
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Bantam Classics) by Harriet Beecher Stowe (67/3057)
The Portrait of a Lady (Penguin Classics) by Henry James (65/3059)
The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2) by Neal Stephenson (65/2682)
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (65/3320)
The Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics) by Edith Wharton (65/3331)
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (65/3422)
The House of Seven Gables (Bantam Classics) by Nathaniel Hawthorne (65/2151)
Ivanhoe (Penguin Classics) by Sir Walter Scott (64/2674)
The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel by Diane Setterfield (64/3973)
Snow Falling on Cedars: A Novel by David Guterson (64/3978 )
Silas Marner by George Eliot (63/2474)
Walden by Henry David Thoreau (63/3122)
Utopia by Thomas More (63/2885)
Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1 (Penguin… by Marcel Proust (63/2646)
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (62/3687)
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt (62/3905)
20,000 leagues under the sea by Jules Verne (62/2984)
The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan (61/2557)
The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and… by Brian Greene (61/2929)
Labyrinth by Kate Mosse (61/1901)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain (60/2557)
Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood (60/2998 )
The Phantom of the Opera: The Original Novel by Gaston Leroux (60/2554)
Baudolino by Umberto Eco (59/2592)
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson (59/3392)
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (59/2507)
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (59/2824)
The Mill on the Floss (Penguin Classics) by George Eliot (59/2283)
The Known World by Edward P. Jones (59/2196)
The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 3) by Neal Stephenson (59/2356)
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe (58/2129)
The Bhagavad Gita (Penguin Classics) by Anonymous (58/3202)
The Good Earth (Enriched Classics) by Pearl S. Buck (58/3314)
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (57/2981)
The Histories (Penguin Classics) by Herodotus (57/2957)
The Last of the Mohicans (Bantam Classics) by James Fenimore Cooper (57/2456)
Infinite Jest: A Novel by David Foster Wallace (57/2312)
Far from the Madding Crowd (Penguin Classics) by Thomas Hardy (56/2560)
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Oprah’s Book Club) by Carson McCullers (56/2706)
The Woman in White (Penguin Classics) by Wilkie Collins (56/2616)
Unfinished Tales: The Lost Lore of Middle-earth by J.R.R. Tolkien (55/2782)
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (55/2256)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (Penguin Classics) by Thomas Hardy (55/2300)
The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood (55/2634)
The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco (55/2314)
Son of a Witch: A Novel by Gregory Maguire (54/2294)
The Return of the Native (Modern Library Classics) by Thomas Hardy (54/2144)
The Gormenghast Novels by Mervyn Peake (53/1376)
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon (53/1915)
Of Human Bondage (Signet Classics) by W. Somerset Maugham (53/2103)
Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence (52/1958 )
Villette by Charlotte Bronte (51/2083)
The Decameron (Penguin Classics) by Giovanni Boccaccio (51/2305)
The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 by Aleksander Solzenitsyn (50/1915)
The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien (49/1854)
Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (48/1625)
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis (48/1875)
Kim by Rudyard Kipling (48/1811)
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (45/1554)
The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas (45/1239)
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (44/1468 )
The Ground Beneath Her Feet: A Novel by Salman Rushdie (42/1278 )
The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke (40/1188 )
The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany (33/657)
The Story of Saddler’s Croft by E & H. [Kate and Hesketh Pritchard] Heron (12/2)
A Victim Of Higher Space by Algernon Blackwood (12/4)
The Story of Baelbrow by E & H. [Kate and Hesketh Pritchard] Heron (12/3)
Dressed To Slay (Silhouette Bombshell) by Harper Allen (11/31)
Dead Is The New Black (Silhouette Bombshell) by Harper Allen (10/28 )
Joseph Andrews and Shamela by Henry Fielding (10/18 )
Ash : a secret history by Mary Gentle (9/0)
Harmless Ghosts by Jessica Amanda Salmonson (9/5)
Vampaholic by Harper Allen (9/28 )
Contact by Evelyn Vaughn (9/22)
Payback by Harper Allen (8/10)
Ultra Violet (Silhouette Bombshell) by Ellen Henderson (8/11)
Vandy Vandy [John] by Manly Wade Wellman (8/4)
The Warder of the Door [Master of Mystery] by L. T. Meade (8/2)
Rouse Him Not by Manly Wade Wellman (8/3)
The Last Grave of Lill Warran [John Thunstone] by Manly Wade Wellman (8/2)
Deceived by Carla Cassidy (8/8 )

I should add another way to mark the books I have taught.

It is sad that I cannot remember whether I read some of these for classes. I was so sleep deprived in college that even when I had time to finish the reading, I apparently did not remember it well. My husband has all the Jane Austin novels, so one summer I read them. I was sure that I had been assigned Sense and Sensibility, but not read it. When I found my own copy, though, it had all sorts of marginal notes in my handwriting, so there you are.

I disliked Foucault’s Pendulum intensely. I’m fairly sure I haven’t picked up anything by Eco since then.

I have read the Silmarillion more than once, but I find it so much less satisfying than Lord of he Rings that I have never been interested in reading any other posthumous Tolkein works.

I read Moll Flanders in college. According to the professor, I was the only one in the class who liked it.

I bought the Satanic Verses when I was traveling. I realized later that it must have been an unauthorized copy, since the book had not come out in paperback yet officially. It got lost (left in the taxi) along with my backpack (and eight weeks’ worth of undeveloped film) the day I returned to Old Colony from that trip.

HBDTY

luolin88 — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:50:40 +0000

Happy Birthday, Zebediah Xerxes!

I still haven’t written out a birth story, but one year ago this time, I had been in the hospital for about eight hours, with another 12-plus to go before the c-section.

Zeb has, amazingly, been getting to sleep for the night before nine the past few days, so I hope he will not be up at 10:33 pm tonight to celebrate the exact time of his birth.

Updated to add: Of course he stayed up late tonight. Also, it was apparently 10:34, not 10:33.

Reunion

luolin88 — Thu, 29 May 2008 06:59:16 +0000

Lisa V. recently (or not so recently) had a post about imagining where you want to be in 5/10/15 years. [I can't find the post now, either because I'm too tired or it's one of the ones she took down.]

I’m not ready to do that quite yet, but as I am heading off to my 20th college reunion, I can look back.

I did not attend the 15th reunion, because between a wedding planned shortly afterwards and my husband’s recent job loss, we didn’t have the time or money. 2003: We got married. My husband got his diagnosis. I stopped being vegetarian.

At the 10th reunion, I had recently defended my dissertation, but had not yet landed my tenure track job. After I got the tt job the next year, I attended my 11th reunion before driving cross country, since it would be the last time I’d be within driving distance of the college. What? Your college doesn’t have a reunion for every class every year? Your reunion probably hasn’t been on the cover of Psychology Today either. Anyway, I really only stopped by for part of a day, and mainly spent the weekend with a friend nearby.

At the 5th reunion, I had recently been discharged from the “behavioral sciences unit” of a hospital. I was about to take a year off from graduate school for full-time language study in Taipei.

20 years ago, I was finishing up my last semester of college. My senior thesis had been handed in in April, but I had comprehensive exams and term papers to write. I didn’t get the offer of the internship in Old Colony until sometime in May, so I was deciding between that and a position in the Peace Corps.

I only go to the reunions when I am sure a couple of my closest remaining college friends will be there, because I tend to get flashbacks to feeling like a complete social misfit freshman year. The people I know best tend to have a love/hate relationship with our college. When we arrived on campus for the 5th reunion, as we were parking the car, both the people with me said they got stomach aches every time they came back, yet one of them had been back every year since graduation and the other had been to a couple of reunions already. In my case, I think I got an excellent education, but I was also very unhappy a lot of the time. It is where I first ended up in therapy, though I didn’t get the big Major Depression diagnosis till graduate school.

Theorizing Gift-giving

luolin88 — Fri, 23 May 2008 05:22:37 +0000

Friends who are not parents: give cute newborn outfits

Friends who are parents: give large-size clothing, 6m at the smallest, 9m and 12m common, some 18m or bigger.

Friends who are grandparents: give cute clothing in small sizes, because they can’t resist it. Also, noisy toys.

The child’s own grandparents: give books and toys, frequently. Also: noisy toys.

Our First Date as Parents

luolin88 — Wed, 21 May 2008 05:18:25 +0000

We went to the Big Box Home Improvement store (to look at paint colors and buy painting supplies) while my mother watched the sleeping baby.

And that was five months ago.

Yes, getting babysitters is a project for this summer.

And yes, we have suggested to both grandmothers that they move to our city, but these modern grandmothers have lives of their own.

We interrupt this hiatus…

luolin88 — Mon, 19 May 2008 04:42:22 +0000

To announce that the Luo family has survived the spring 2008 academic semester, more or less.

It is rather sad, though, that I couldn’t even pay enough attention to the blog to publish a couple of posts that were 95% written already.

I have 3085 posts waiting to read on bloglines, but if you are reading this, then yours is probably one of the few blogs I have managed to keep up with.

Incongruities

luolin88 — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 05:14:45 +0000

After years of going to yoga class two or three times a week up until the day before I went into labor, I finally bought a pair of real yoga pants this summer, because the stretch capris I had been wearing for yoga didn’t fit anymore. I have only gone to yoga class once since Zebediah was born almost nine months ago.
I teach at an institution of higher learning. There is a lot of construction going on right now. In front of one major path that is blocked off, there is a large sign that says:

Pardon our dust.

Rome Wasn’t built in a day.

Neither will State U.

Somebody tried to help by adding a “be” (Neither will State U. be) but this was apparently considered a heinous act of vandalism and was carefully painted over.

I don’t let Zebediah eat anything that falls on the floor, but he crawls around all day on that same floor and sucks on his thumb or fingers or hand much of the day as well.
I decided on my choice for the Democratic nominee about an hour before we went to vote in the primary. We also went to the caucus, and now I am an Obama delegate to the county convention.
I am barely writing anything on this blog, yet today I found myself thinking about setting up a professional blog under my real name.

Time to Start Paying Attention

luolin88 — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 05:11:35 +0000

For the first time since I have lived here, our primary is not happening after somebody has already clinched the (democratic) nomination. There’s even going to be a debate here.

I asked my students to write about who they wanted to be president on the writing portion of their exam. Once I grade it, I’ll report back on the state of this red state’s youth.

Really, I have been paying attention, but I have not been motivated to research the details of anyone’s position, since I thought the nominee would be chosen before I got to vote.

Speaking of research, may I just say, thank heavens for the League of Women Voters, because if it weren’t for their voter guide, it would be difficult to know anything about the local races around here.