Celebrity

It seems that every single person who has visited me in NYC has had a celebrity sighting – except me! This due in part to the fact that the moment I leave my 5 story walk up, I go into New York tunnel vision. I avoid eye contact with every single person on the street asking for money or handing out fliers. In fact, I’m SO good at it that I avoid people that I even know (unintentionally!). On more than one occasion, I’ve walked right past my own roommate on the street. I think this is why I never notice celebrities – but I often wonder what I’d do if I did. After having gone to see Inception at the wonderful Kaufman theater out here in Queens last night, I began looking up some of the cast online. I can across a quote from Joseph Gordon-Levitt saying that he hates ‘celebrity’ and hates being recognized in public. I often wonder how or if I would approach someone like that. I greatly admire his work – particularly in Brick and Inception. I think he’s a talented actor. How would it be any different than coming across one of the well known researcher’s in my field at a conference? If I wasn’t clingy or weird but just emphasized that I really like his work, how would that come across? I have to say, in some sense I can relate to celebrities and why they feel this way about being approached in public. Though the circumstances were different, in Hokkaido I got so sick of being followed, stared at, having my photo taken, or being asked the stupidest questions about America/white people/gaijin, whatever. The sort of voyeurism people acted out around me made me feel self conscious and uncomfortable. Sometimes I wouldn’t leave my house to buy groceries until I absolutely HAD TO because I was so tired of being treated as the gaijin oddity in rural Japan. I wanted so badly to be anonymous – to walk into a coffee shop, order a latte, and leave without having to answer anyone’s stupid questions (which were always the same) or be stared at. I imagine this must be how celebrities feel, too. In that way, I would like to believe that if I ever had a celebrity run-in in New York I’d be able to handle it appropriately. If it was just a well known celebrity that I’m not a big fan of, I’d probably take notice and nothing more. I’d try not to stare. And I certainly wouldn’t take photos. If it was someone I greatly admired, I think I would consider approaching them, unless they were out with their kids or family – I think that’s too intrusive. If I did approach the person, I definitely wouldn’t treat them as a larger than life unhuman figure. I’d try to talk to them the same way I would someone at a conference, “I just wanted to say that I really admire your work..” and from there, depending on how they react, decide whether to talk more or less or to leave.  Overall, the concept of celebrity is so strange.

Businesses that don’t make any money… on purpose!

This was a totally foreign concept to me until I moved to New York City. It turns out that there are a number of stores in NY that make no profit. Meaning, the store only exists in a certain location to serve as a giant functioning advertisement. Do you think the Walgreens or Starbucks in Times Square sell enough merchandise and lattes to pay rent? Of course not – the corporation foots the bill due to the value of advertising on such prime real estate. Who would have guessed?! Now there is a UniQlo store opening up on 5th Ave at a price of.. wait.. $300Million! (as a side note, the fact that UniQlo is popping up all over NYC is weird to me anyway. It’s a Japanese store and I used to shop there in Japan. Over there its kind of like Old Navy. Here the prices are still pretty low, but it seems to be much more hip).

http://consumerist.com/2010/04/uniqlo-paying-record-300-million-for-fifth-avenue-spot.html

Top Five Inexpensive or Free Tech Tools for Grad School

I’ve been a bad blogger, A very bad blogger. I can’t promise I’ll write more often, but I’ll let you know when I do! So, I haven’t written in ages and decided that right now, instead of doing the work I’m supposed to be doing, I’m going to write a blog entry instead ^__^. Mostly just because I’ve found soooo much cool stuff recently that does help me me fitter, happier, more productive… Get ready for a total nerdfest, I have no shame. I’ve often said I’m an information junkie fortunate enough to live in the information age. Case and point:

1. ZOTERO

Every graduate student really should get this. It’s a way to organize all of your sources for papers. If you want to get an online log-in, you can even sync two computers together. I sync my netbook and my laptop because I carry my netbook to class (since it’s teeny) but generally work on my laptop at home. This way, even if I had a bunch of new sources to Zotero at home, they’ll be on my netbook when I go to class. They also have Word and Open Office add-ons (and whatever you Mac people use, too!) so that as you type a paper, you can add in your sources. At the end you tell it to ‘create bibliography’ in whatever style you like (Chicago, APA, MLA, etc etc). Of course double check it because it makes mistakes, but it still cuts tons of time out of making a bibliography. Here are some screen shots of mine:

I also bought extra storage space on Zotero and have an online log-in. One wonderful thing about it is the ever growing online community of scholars. You can share your library with others and see what people in your field are reading. Love it.

2. Google Reader

Google Reader is an RSS Feed reader. For those who are unfamiliar, RSS feeds can be found on any webpage you read regularly, or if not, you can create one for it. So, for example, if there are blogs in your field that you read often but sometimes forget to check, add them to your reader and they’ll be updated daily. Rather than sifting through your bookmarks, just open your reader and read all the latest news in the morning over breakfast. You can also add friends blogs to the feed, podcasts, and your Hulu queue, if you have one. There’s a screenshot of mine in the gallery at the top of this page. You can read the whole post directly from your Reader, or you can click on it to go to the page if you really want to.

3. Dropbox

I can not emphasize enough what a life saver this has been! If you use two computers or if you would like to be able to access files from your home computer at any computer without constantly emailing them to yourself, this program is for you! It add itself to the files on your computer and you save your documents in it (It’s its own little folder just like My Documents). Then it syncs  the files online. You can either install a dropbox on your secondary computer and it will sync them up, or you can access your dropbox online from any computer. So, if I am working on a paper on my home computer and I save it to my dropbox, if I go to open it later on my netbook, the document and all recent changes are updated. I can then work on it some more, save it again, and open it back up on my new computer with changes updated. I never had to email the document to myself or put it on a flash drive. It’s as easy as ctrl+S and getting on with my life. No hassle at all.

4. Good Reader Ipod Touch/ Iphone App

Why waste time on the train? Good Reader makes it insanely easy to upload PDFs to your Ipod (even super large ones) and read them with ease. Since most of my class assignments are PDFs, I don’t have to miss a beat staying on top of things. If I’m behind on readings, I just add them to my Ipod and read them on the train. At first glance the App may seem complicated, but the tutorials that come with it are great at explaining how it works. I can’t emphasize enough how much this app has changed my life! I recently had to give a presentation using PowerPoint.. I just converted my PowerPoint to a PDF (use a PDF converter like Adobe) and added it to my Ipod. Then I could go through the slides on my Ipod and practice m presentation on the way to class. It could also be used as a replacement for notecards if you were presenting on something. Your Ipod is about the same size as an index card, and flipping through a PDF with this program is just as easy as flipping through index cards. I love it.

5. Ambiance Ipod Touch/ Iphone App

Do you have trouble studying when it’s noisy? Or trouble focusing? Or maybe you can’t think when it’s too quiet and you need the low murmur of people talking in a coffee shop to concentrate? Either way, this app is for you! It gives you hundreds of calm background sounds to choose from to help you focus. Once you have the program, you download as many sounds as you want for free through the app using WiFi or internet. Some examples are ‘crowd’, ‘French cafe’, ‘American cafe’ ‘Thunderstorm’ ‘white noise’ ‘Gregorian chant’. Literally… hundreds… You can also download a number of binaural beats/ tones that help with focusing and relaxation.

If I think of any more, I’ll make an updated list. Also, if anyone has any questions about any of these, come talk to me! I learned about every single one of them by having someone else kindly take the time to explain to me how they worked, so I’m more than willing to pass on the knowledge!

Ok, nerdfest over.

The South for all its bad and good

I’ll be the first to admit that the South has its faults. However, coming back to visit during Winter Break, just like every homecoming, reminds me that there are things I really love about this place, too.

Throughout my teenage years in a small rural town in Tennessee, I refused to identify myself as a Southerner. Growing up as a child, I wasn’t usually identifiable as one anyhow, and perhaps that’s how it started. My family came from the Midwest and moved to Tennessee when I was 4. The fact that I was already talking when we moved meant that I was less likely to pick up a Southern drawl. Furthermore, this combined with the confusion from the local dialect (or maybe it was unrelated?) meant that I had a speech impediment growing up. I took speech therapy classes for years in order to correct it, and that basically left me with a pretty neutral, unidentifiable accent. The lack of an accent on its own was enough to send red flags for most people that I ‘wasn’t from around here’. Our family still identified as being pretty Midwestern, too. That also set us apart from neighborhood kids who called us Yankees and made constant references to the Civil War (I kid you not). I tried to explain that, to the best of my 10 year old knowledge, Minnesota didn’t fight in the Civil War, but this didn’t seem to make a difference. I ended up feeling like I wasn’t ‘Southern’ since it’s what everyone told me.

As a teenager I began to identify ‘Southern-ness’ with fundamentalist religion and conservative ideology – particularly neo-conservative ideology. It also, in my mind, brought with it an excessive amount of bigotry and racism. An incident in which a high school coach referred to Muslims as ‘towel-heads’ was all it took to cement my decision. As soon as I could, I was getting away from this place. It seemed to me that everything I’d ever been taught about equality and Civil Rights and loving people was a whole lot of hypocrisy. I hated most things that could be associated with Southern culture, too. Hunting, muddin’, paintball, Southern food, religion, etc.

In college I didn’t worry myself too much with these thoughts. Though I stayed in Tennessee for college, I remained in my educated, liberal ‘bubble’ at a great college with great friends. I went on living my life with people who shared my beliefs and values and understood my discontent. A number of these people still love Tennessee, especially the mountains. I didn’t put much thought into it, however, until I moved to Japan. In Japan, people focus a lot on the region they came from. Hokkaido is famous for this, people in Osaka are like this.. regional heritage is huge part of conversation, and people take a lot of pride in it. When people asked me about Tennessee, I found myself remembering all of the things that were unique and special about it. I had loved the 4 years I spent in college in Appalachia and recounted stories of wildlife, the great outdoors, etc. I taught my elementary school students how to cook fried okra. I played country music in my classroom and told students about Elvis and Johnny Cash. I even introduced them to Charlie Daniels.

This visit reminds me that there are things that I miss. The South is really rich in culture, and the culture is certainly unique and untouched in many ways. Nashville is an amazing city with a well-known Country Music scene, but also a blooming Indie scene with some amazing musicians (Kings of Leon and Jack White call Nashville home). Quentin Tarantino’s East Tennessee upbringing comes out when he shows a bunch of good ole’ boys kicking ass in his recent film Inglorious Bastards. Eating Southern cooking since I’ve been back: fried dill pickles, fried green tomatoes, okra, cornbread, collard greens, squash, boudin all remind me of the South’s unique history and the influence of it on food. The South isn’t without its faults. The rich musical history and cuisine are both heavily influenced by African Americans whose ancestors came to the South as slaves. I still feel that there is a long way to go down here regarding Civil Rights. People will be polite and politically correct publicly because they are aware of the reprimands they face otherwise, but behind closed doors people still say things like, “Can you believe that girl at church is dating a black boy?”. They’re quiet about that, but quite open and feelings toward homosexuality, since that isn’t protected across the board yet. It’s upsetting and frustrating because I love this place and I love the people, but there seems to be so little understanding and open-mindedness, or so I thought. In living abroad, visiting other countries, and living in other states, I’ve learned tha discrimination is widespread everywhere, thought it may be more discreet or directed toward different groups. I don’t think the South is necessarily worse.. but it saddens me everywhere that this kind of thing happens.

Things I’ve had to work on when I visit here include trying not to be judgemental and being open-minded, especially if I accuse others of not being so. I have to be careful not to judge people too fast just because they’re religious, Republican, or Southern, because some people WILL surprise you. Being here and going on long drives through mountains or farm land makes me appreciate how different this is from the city. People really are friendly, even to strangers, and Southern manners are an important lifeskill. People have a strong sense of family and look out for each other. Relationships and marriages tend to be more ‘old fashioned’ but I’m not the type of person who minds occasional chivalry, despite the stern disapproval of many of my modern feminist female friends. I don’t think that makes me any less of a feminist. The bottom line is, I lived 20 years of my life (more or less) in the South, and if I’m going to call anywhere ‘home’, this must be it. Love it or hate it, I have to claim it. I’m just trying now to see every side of it.

Collard Greens

Also, a great resource on Southern Literature: http://www.oxfordamerican.org/

High Five New York!

Bwah-ha-ha-ha. Most of this is near campus, too!

My unplanned addiction to technology and why it is New York’s fault.

So if I thought I was connected before, New York has really done a number on me. Tech literacy is a MUST in this city and in gaduate school. I can’t claim to be tech-savy in that I don’t know the inneroworkings of most things on my computer and require help from friends if any behind-the-scenes adjusting needs to take place. However, knowledge of all the user-friendly programs out there is a complete must. It’s amazing to me how much technology I use on a daily basis and what is out there, so I’m compiling a list here of the things I use most.

• Bobst is tech savy! Bobst is my school’s library, which has all of the obvious online databases, a well as a few extra sevices. Aside from spending so much time there, having Bobst programmed into my cell and on my ‘friend’ list makes me feel liek we’re old buddies. Students can text message the library to ask for help finding a source. I have done it before when I was having trouble accessing an electronic version of a Harper’s article, and they replied back in about 2 minutes! The same service is also available on messenger and in an online chat screen from the library webpage. In adition to this, you can also have a text sent to your phone with the call number for a book, once you find it in the online catalogue. In a huge library with over 10 floors, it sure makes things easier.
• NYU Home. This is our online center for.. well.. EVERYTHING! Everything for the school is managed here from club activities, to e-mail, to bursar information, to class assignments. It’s insanely well organized, in my opinion, and is far superior to the system I had in undergrad. It’s very streamlined.
• Zotero….. Zotero has changed my life! It helps you to organize sources, create bibliographies online and in word, tag sources and put them in folders, take notes on them… basically anything you could every want to do, in HALF the time. You can tell it if you want to use Chicago style, MLA, APA or whatever kind of citations and you can use it to insert them into your work as you go along. It’s hard to explain it without seeing it, so search for some screenshots.
• Itunes/Ipod Touch.. Aside from the little white earbuds proving to be an excellent way to avoid talking to stangers on the subway, I use this for absolutely everything… I have a Japanese kanji dictionary, a regular dictionary, podcasts ranging from my school’s official podcast to BBC to This American Life to LSAT Logic to The New Yorker.. I have at least 12 podcasts that I can choose from if I’m not in a music mood during my commute or when I’m walking around. Also on my ipod I have uploaded subway maps and route listings, and I have HopStop (a guide for subway directions) and Not For Tourists guide to the city on my ipod. I’m so dependent on it that it’s not even funny.

That’s just a list of what I have used TODAY alone. It’s really quite crazy…. I’m also learning Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop at the moment in order to be able to better create posters for [future] conferences. It’s crazy to think that I have itunes for organizing my music, Zotero for organizing my work, and Facebook fo organizing my friends/social life. It’s a fast-paced world out there.. I could certainly get into the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, but I’ll leave that for you all to ponder. Maybe I’ll write on that later on down the road.

More posts later, but for now:

This is why New York is so much fun. I’m trying to get involved with Improv Everywhere. Yay for culture-jamming.

What I put myself through for a falafel. Plus, Bohemian Beer Garden, and Salsa Dancing.

This week has been a whirlwind of activity, and I think it’s only going to get crazier. I love it though. Let me start first by talking about what happened to me last night… I had spent a productive day in the library and was headed home when my friend Brian called me up to come meet him in Sunnyside, in Queens, for some drinks. I was in Manhattan, but I was headed out anyway, so I told him, sure, I’d be there. I was in Washington Square not TOO FAR from the station.. how long could it possibly take. There was just one problem… I really wanted to get a Baba Ghanouj sandwich and this wonderful place called Mamoun’s. I thought I knew how to get there, so I walked down Astor place, but I didn’t see it close by, so I just settled for another falafel place that didn’t have a baba ghanouj sandwich but did have a pretty decent falafel with some bizarre pickles and decent hot sauce. I walked up one side of the street, crossed over, went in and got my falafel, then walked out and back the way I came. However, since I had crossed over the street, when I walked back, the street actually split and I ended up on a different street. I noticed when things didn’t look familiar anymore and I had walked for a while without finding the subway. So.. I figured it must have split off, and I could nly be about a block to the right of where I should have been.. so I started walking… but with no luck. I have no idea where I ended up or how I got so turned around, but I had to call Brian and tell him not only that I wouldn’t be able to make it.. but that in all of my falafel bliss I had gotten myself lost. Luckily he helped me get situated and got me to a station where I could get to Sunnyside, still. SO, I went down into the station only to learn that due to work on the line, no trains were running UPTOWN… which means I couldn’t get to Queens from there… Soooooo… I had to walk a loooong way back to my original station and gave up and headed home. Brian sent me a text telling me to get off at his stop and we could still hang out, but I got it too late and was already home. Soooo, instead, we decide to hang out in MY neighborhood and went to the Bohemian Beer Hall! We were among just a handful of guests left that late at night, but it was fun. It’s an outdoor beer garden and apparently in the summer they have stands out there where you can get sausage or whatever the hell you want and they project old Czech and Slovak movies on the walls. I really want to check that out next summer because it sounds SO like my neighborhood, and so unique!

What else is new… I signed up to take conversation classes in Japanese and French. I’m looking forward to that getting started because it’s just something I’m doing for fun (no grades on this), and I REALLY need to keep up with Japanese before I forget all of it. Also, today, I signed up for Salsa and Mambo on 2 dance classes! I have some experience with salsa dancing already, but Mamba on 2 is a totally new thing for me! It’s Afro-Caribbean-based and completely unique to New York! The description said, “Students will learn musicality, styling, mambo shines, Cuban motion, single and double turns, simple and advanced footwork patterns in a high intensity cardio format.” Sounds great to me! I’m really looking forward to that because it’s totally new.. plus I LOVE dancing. I’ve been pretty shy in general since moving up here, but hopefully getting back into that will get me out of my shell a bit AND help me to meet some new people!

Here’s a video of New York Style Mambo on 2:

see also:

How awesome is that!

Anyway, I guess I should get back to work… Definitely staying plenty busy!

From my reading on consumerism

I fully intend to take a study break and write a blog later on, but for now I HAD TO share this. This is from a book I am reading by Zygmunt Bauman called Consuming Life. He is quoting Joseph Brodsky, who described a life based only in consumption as follows:

You’ll be bored with your work, your spouses, your lovers, the view from your window, the furniture or wallpaper in your room, your thoughts, yourselves. Accordingly, you’ll try to devise ways of escape. Apart from self-gratifying gadgets mentioned before, you may take up changing jobs, residence, company, country, climate, you may take up promiscuity, alcohol, travel, cooking lessons, drugs, psychoanalysis… In fact, you may lump all these together, and for a while that may work. Until the day, of course, when you wake up in your bedroom amid a new family and a different wallpaper, in a different state and climate, with a heap of bills from your travel agent and your shrink, yet with the same stale feeling toward the light of day pouring through your window…

1. Bauman, Zygmunt, Consuming Life (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009). 
   

I love my work…. More later… now back to reading.

Sept. 11th in NY

The city is rainy and gray today. Feels like it’s crying. Feels like being an outsider on my first Sept. 11th in NY. It’s like I showed up at a wake I wasn’t invited to.

Today I walked down to a local bakery and chatted w/ the shop owner at a fruit stand. I was just thinking about how much I love this city and love being here. There were police everywhere, just walking the streets in yellow rain coats. I didn’t think anything of it until I remembered what day it was. I wonder if having them present and EVERYWHERE today is to help people feel safer? It’s been raining and melancholy outside all morning. It’s chilly and gray. I realized that everyone around me is grieving, and though Sept. 11th affected me, as an American, I know it is different for New Yorkers. On Sept. 11th, I was a high school student and an announcement came over the intercom for the classes to turn on the news. We saw the 2nd place hit live, I believe. I remember being shocked… Then there was the pentagon and the plane crash in the field. I felt safe because I was in Tennessee. It seemed to me that we couldn’t have been a target… but I still fell asleep watching the news that evening. I think I was glued to the coverage from the time I came home from school until I went to bed. I think it was because I just didn’t know when it was going to stop. More and more things kept happening… but I still felt safe in my small town bubble.

Today, I thought about what it would have been like to be HERE when it happened. I’ve thought about this a few times on the subway, actually, several times when I take my train home from campus. Sometimes I read the signs on the trains that read ‘Although emergency evacuations are rare, we want our customers to be prepared,” and lays out the evacuation plans. I wondered what it would be like to be coming home when the planes hit. I’m sure the subways were evacuated. I’m sure people panicked. I remember hearing that no one’s cellphone was working b/c SO many people were trying to make calls to check on friends and family. I don’t ever have any reason to go out to the WTC site, and I don’t know anyone who goes out there much, but I know that being in this city it would be terrifying not knowing if that was the only site that had been hit or what was next. I am confident that I could have seen it from the roof of my building. I imagine I probably would have exited the subway and walked home (I doubt the trains kept running, but I could be wrong). I probably would have watched from my roof for a while, knowing that I wouldn’t be more or less safe by doing that. I’d probably follow the coverage or talk to people in the street about what they knew. So far, in my experience, New Yorkers do talk to each other a lot when something strange or out of the ordinary happens. I was on the train once here and all the lights went out when we were in a tunnel. People were talking to each other to see if anyone knew anything. I’m sure people would have been meeting at the corner news stand or fruit stand or coffee shop trying to get information since other access to information would be limited. People would have to rely on their neighbors and neighborhoods for support when they were unable to reach friends and family. In my neighborhood, I think that woul have offered SOME comfort. The people here are extremely ‘neighborly’ in every sense of the word, despite all their differences.

I’m not going down to Ground Zero this evening.. just seems like it will be crowded and a lot of tourists. But I will definitely look for the lights, which should show up pretty well with all the clouds tonight. I’m sure I can see it easily when I cross the bridge into Brooklyn later this evening when I go to hang out there. I never gave much thought to September 11th anniversaries before moving here. The only people who got worked up about it in TN were people who would call anyone who wasn’t worked up unpatriotic and a terrorist. But now, being here, yeah… I feel sad. I love this city, and I feel bad for this city.