it's late but i still can't fall asleep. my mother says it's the starbucks iced coffee i had this afternoon (the stuff in the can is so good~it's the perfect balance of coffee, sugar, and milk!), but i don't think coffee really works on me.

we're in south carolina now. the resort is lovely. our room is on the top floor with oceanfront views. we have a kitchen, and i have my own room (with 2 double beds! i could alternate where i sleep each night!) with an adjoining bathroom. we bought groceries today~i love cooking on vacation. photos to come in the next few days.

mary and julie (my suitemates from this past year) visited on tuesday through thursday. our activities included:

making half pepperoni, half pineapple-chicken pizza*baking butterscotch chip oatmeal cookies*a walk around the lake*a visit to the national zoo*lunch at the cosi by the white house (we ate there last summer when julie and jodi visited, and julie wanted to return for the yummy free bread we got to munch on while waiting in line to order)*french manicures*shopping at the mall*late-night kids' meals at wendy's*baking gooey butter cake (w/a pound of powdered sugar!), a stl specialty*waking up at 5:30 am to see the preakness hot air balloons launch at turf valley (they ended up not flying b/c of poor air conditions)*bollman truss bridge*historic savage mill*preakness crab derby at lexington market

below, some photos from their stay.

d.c.

preakness balloons

savage

preakness crab derby at lexington market
now i think i can fall asleep. good night!

museums

harry benson: being there is on exhibit at the national portrait gallery. browse the photographs on display. i haven't visited yet in person, but just going through the images online was incredibly moving.

wolfgang tillmans is exhibiting at the hirshhorn! some of his photographs have been showing at my university's art museum, and i really like them. short blurb on him:

German artist Wolfgang Tillmans is internationally recognized for capturing often overlooked subjects and moments in everyday life. His photographs focus on deceptively casual views of friends and acquaintances caught at their most unguarded and human moments.

this friday, he'll be at "hirshhorn afterhours," where they turn the museum and sculpture garden into a sort of club/lounge. description:

Opening celebration for the exhibition Wolfgang Tillmans
featuring DJ Spencer Product

Late-night exhibition viewing
Hang out with artist Wolfgang Tillmans
Add your thoughts to the audio scrapbook
Chat with friends or make new ones in the conversation lounge
Sip cocktails and dance outdoors on the Plaza until midnight

sounds amazing amazing, but timing is poor. we're leaving for the beach very early saturday morning, and we have dinner guests friday night.

the green house: new directions in sustainable architecture and design is showing at the national building museum until june 24th. it shows all sorts of neat environmentally-friendly technology that people can incorporate into their homes, and even a full-size replica of a 'green' house built by architect michelle kaufmann. i can't wait to check it out!

happy museum-hopping!

making breakfast this morning for my mother went superbly, although breakfast turned into lunch because i hadn't realized ahead of time that the almond-date crusts for the blueberry tartlets needed to be chilled for two hours before they could be assembled. i jumped out of bed at 8:30 (sans alarm clock!) and ran off to the grocery store for a mango and fontina. the weather is perfect early in the day, and the roads are so peaceful on weekend mornings.
i want to make tapenade now because i have the food processor and a full jar of green olives in the fridge. there's a recipe in nancy silverton's sandwich book, but all her spreads are made by hand with a mortar and pestle. last summer i wanted to buy a set, so i went to the gourmet kitchen store, but they only had gigantic ones in stock. my dad wasn't happy that i brought home a food processor, so i don't think he'd like it if i brought home a giant marble/granite/whatever mortar and pestle. i think my next kitchen gadget will be an ice cream maker.

i am home

i have returned home to find that my parents have enacted quite a lifestyle change for themselves in terms of diet. not only have they finally converted to the skim milk that i used to plead with them to drink, but now they even surprise me in terms of how health-conscious they are. the moment i arrived home from the airport to my waiting mother, she eagerly offered, "i made you a fruit drink": a blend of grapes, strawberries, and milk. "it's all natural sugars and full of protein."

after dinner, she got even more excited than she was about the drink. "ooo! let me make you a treat that dad and i now eat everyday!" plain, fat-free yogurt with chunks of fresh pineapple. she stuffed my mouth with a giant spoonful. "no fat! all natural sugars!"

we eat oatmeal for breakfast everyday now, except my mom's been eating instant grits lately because she grabbed the wrong box at the grocery store thinking it was plain oatmeal. my dad and i have been assigned the task of finishing the wholesale-store-size variety pack of oatmeal she bought because the variety pack turned out to be not so varied, as each flavor inevitably contains cinnamon, and she doesn't like the cinnamon.

yesterday i learned that the smoothie and pineapple-yogurt concoction are my mother's original creations. at work, her coworkers have named the drink after her, the "j. milkshake." today for lunch, she made me another one of her originals: vegetable soup with spinach, tomatoes, mushrooms, egg, dried itty bitty prawns, etc. not bad. "no oil!" she's a shameless promoter of her concoctions.

as much as i make fun of my mother's ways, i must admit that i am impressed. her creations are very creative and pretty tasty--i actually requested the pineapple-yogurt mix last night because i was craving it. (craving's a strong word--maybe just in the mood for it.) my mother's one of those people who, if she sets her mind/heart on something, will make it work.

backtrack for a sec: the flight home from school. the old man i had to deal with at the united check-in counter was a cross between scrooge and cheney. no hint of a smile on his face, only a pointy, hooked nose like the penguin in batman and emptiness in his heart like the grinch.

he had me place my first checked bag on the scale. initially 51, then down to 49.5, and finally settled at 50. perfect. 50 lbs is the limit.

i moved that one off and struggled (but managed) to get my second bag on the scale. he made no move to assist. 93. inside, my eyes bulged and i thought, damn. sometimes i even impress myself.

"that's way way way overweight." thank you, mr. obvious.

"yeah, i'll pay the extra fee." i had already checked united's website for their overweight luggage policies--$50. way more than what i had to pay last year on american, but i had resigned myself to the fact that it was inevitable that i have one piece of overweight luggage.

the old man whispered something to the united check-in counter man next to him, who audibly replied, "no, it has to be above 99." the old man was noticeably disappointed. i handed him my credit card, doing my best to shoot cold evil from my eyes at him as i did so.

he wanted to charge me more than the $50 for my suitcase. with all his heart he wanted that. i wish my bag had been 98.5. asshole.

i have yet to unpack, but my suitcases are now at least both in my room. the 93-pounder we left on the bottom floor after we brought it in from the garage. i had to take two trips to unload the heavier things like the textbooks and all the shoes before i could drag it up to my room on the third floor. the task of unpacking 140+ pounds of my stuff is incredibly daunting right now.

i had a layover in chicago. on the plane into chicago, there was a man sitting in the row in front of me who had a silvery blond mustache that he had grown long at either end so that he could put product in them and twist them so that they stuck two or three inches out from his face on either side with the texture and stiffness of straw. his tie was gradated rainbow, like the matrix in photo-editing software where you select what shade you want to tint a photo. the words "salt lake city" had been embroidered on the cuff of his white button-up, and he wore tie-dyed socks inside his slip-on shoes. on the plane leaving chicago, there was an african-american man wearing a beige seersucker suit with an orange shirt underneath, and it was perfect.

back to the topic of my mother: mother's day. we'll be celebrating on saturday instead because for sunday brunch, we've been invited to dim sum with some family friends. i will be making my mother breakfast: (raw, antioxidant-rich) blueberry tartlets (a recipe i found from SELF magazine that's originally from the golden door spa in cali), my very own avocado omelettes, martha's sweet potato hash browns, and ina's tropical smoothies. the smoothies have mango and papaya and bananas and orange in them. my mother says she doesn't like mango or papaya, but i'm going to make the smoothies anyways. i don't think she knows how good mango is in smoothies. she's never had odwalla's mango tango.

i bought a food processor yesterday. i'll need it to make the almond crust of the tartlets, but that's not the only reason i bought it. it's handy to have around. we used to have one but it got lost in all the moving. i want to food process things. i can make pesto, but i need 5 cups of basil, according to giada. she's beautiful, isn't she? anyways, that much basil would be expensive at the store, so i should probably grow it myself. i don't know how fast i can grow 5 cups of basil.

i'm between reading any place i hang my hat and the latest issue of harper's bazaar. until next time.

well, summer has officially begun. i am done with all of my exams & grading for micro, three boxes of my stuff have been taken away for summer storage, and all of my other belongings are packed up in two suitcases, one purple duffel, one small black purse, and a laptop bag. the walls of my room are bare now--they echo if i yell towards them, and i am sleeping in a sleeping bag on my naked mattress.

the contents of suitcases are very revealing about a person, i think. you could construct entire stories, entire lives around them. among my belongings are: a robin's egg blue english biscuits tin adorned with the image of a chrysanthemum bloom, an empty glass japanese soda bottle with a marble entrapped in the neck, my frayed brown chucks and gray tweed vans, two decks of playing cards and two calculators, a chinese-english dictionary, and the tiny composition notebook in which i documented my new orleans trip. do you think tsa personnel craft such tales when they do random searches of checked luggage?

i will be home tomorrow in time for dinner. i cannot wait. it's hard to believe summer is finally here. i desperately need home right now.

sometimes, randomly, i get a wave of stupid, difficult-to-contain excitement about going to the beach with the 'rents. in those moments, i can't help but smile and must suppress the urge to squeal. we're going to have a kitchen in our room at the resort. i hope we buy crabmeat at the local grocery store (maybe a piggly wiggly?) and my mom makes crabcakes. it's something we seem to always do when we're at the beach~myrtle, outer banks, rehoboth.

last night, to grade exams, the professor and i went to a coffee shop by campus. i was treated to an iced chai and blueberry scone (i wanted pumpkin, but they were out), courtesy of the business school. it made grading much more pleasant.

over the course of the semester, this professor has grown on me a lot. a year ago, as a student in her class, i thought her rather strange and eccentric. as i've gotten to talk to her, these quirks have become endearing, and i've come to really admire her. i am in awe of the life she has created for herself.

she is very young, under thirty i imagine. she's jewish, from brooklyn originally. she went to nyu undergrad and then straight to harvard for her phd. from there, she went right to teaching here--immersed in academia in her career thus far. she spent last semester in san francisco, living in a cottage (in some wealthy neighborhood that she wouldn't have been able to afford had it not been for the cottages that are rented out on the properties of the mansion-owners), and working between stanford and uc berkeley. two weeks ago, she flew away to california again for a day to give a talk at caltech. california. amazing.

she goes to europe two or three times a year, mainly for conferences but combined with pleasure trips. she went to one in marseille that somehow turned out to be awful. she lunches with famous game theorists.

she is a caffeine addict. when we grade exams, she always suggests we do it at a coffee shop. i once met up with her around ten or eleven at night, and she arrived with venti starbucks in hand. she is always predictably late. she speaks with a slight lisp and has a goofy laugh, what one would imagine as a guffawing sort of laugh.

her uniform is a knee-length skirt and tee, sometimes with a zip-up hoodie on top. in class, she always seems to be wearing the same jean skirt. i imagine she has ten of the same skirt in her closet--after all, it does have nice lines, and it suits her well. i've also seen her in khaki cargo skirts. she has an orange puma messenger bag that i covet, and yesterday she was wearing a small silver, space-age tumi backpack. she has all sorts of neat tech gadgets. she has these in-ear headphones for her ipod nano that make her completely and totally and hilariously oblivious to everyone around her. i've also seen her jamming to music wearing those big black headphones that cover your ears. i've never asked her what she's listening to though.

when i talk to her, sometimes it feels like i'm talking to another student. i think she's ridiculously smart, like genius caliber. her mind works in ways that i cannot follow.

anyhow, i've grown to admire and respect her greatly.

yesterday, i spent an hour sunbathing and studying finance in the quad. i was wearing the most comfortable sundress from target. the cotton is so soft; it feels like i'm wearing a nightgown. some photos of the afternoon:

airport in twelve hours. sleepy eyes~bedtime.

sweet dreams.

you've got mail

over the course of this past reading week, when time has seemed to float in some state of in-betweenness and the days of the week have blurred together, i discovered some reasons why i like weekdays (although still not more than weekends):
i get more emails on weekdays
glamour blogs update on weekdays
i compulsively check my bank of america account online, and i hate it when transactions are listed as "pending" because it's such a state of limbo. i like weekdays because that's the only time when transactions can go from pending to posted.
on weekends, the only eatery open on main campus is subway, so meals when i'm at the library on weekends are generally unpleasant.

two days until i return home. it feels unreal. last night and the night before, i watched you've got mail and packed. yesterday studying at the library looking out the window at campus, it felt strange that i'd be leaving. i haven't been home since january, probably the longest i've gone without seeing home (okay, it's not that long, but it is for me). it's funny to spend half the year in one place and half in another and to have both feel right (although nothing can beat home home).

i love the movie you've got mail. i ordered it last night from amazon, along with lonely planet's shanghai guidebook. the writing/dialogue/script of the movie is so good:

Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life. Well, not small, but valuable. And sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven't been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around? I don't really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So good night, dear void.

there's a lot to wonder about. sometime this summer when i'm feeling particularly reflective and pensive, i'll pour all my conflicted thoughts out to you.

i dropped off charley and mojito with kelsey last night. they'll be summering in peoria, il.

i thought i was over the rainboots, but i'm not. what do you think of this pair? they're very similar to the ones i wanted before, but the dots are in a grid pattern. they will also ship out in 1 to 2 days, so i won't be frustrated like i was with the last pair.

okay, off to lunch with yj & kelsey. finance exam tonight (last one!), followed by grading micro exams maybe at a coffee shop. at this point, i'd rather take my exam than grade, but the prospect of yummy coffee drinks makes it bearable.

take care. ^_^

i'm wearing rainbow-striped pants

much to tell much to tell.

first, happy birthday, pops! (don't worry~we talked on the phone too. i didn't just give him a "shout-out" on my blog.)

my apartment in shanghai for the summer: (it's all furnished!)isn't it lovely? i'm so excited. ^_^

ooooo lookit! watch carefully for a special cameo appearance by yours truly:

this german artist came in the fall to our university's art museum (where i work) to install his art--that's when all the footage was shot.

i turned in my study abroad application on monday! hoorah!

i'm more than halfway through finals! 3 down, 1 more to go + 1 take-home exam + grading micro finals. 6 days. i have a layover in chicago~not a huge fan of o'hare & the shops inside (at least in the terminal where i've always had to wait), but i'm excited to buy some mindless fashion/beauty magazine to read while i wait, plus maybe a sudoku/crossword book.

while we're on the subject of mindlessness... i would like a pair of ballet flats in red or zebra. my nails are painted a pale nude color now, called innocence. on tuesday, they were painted wondermelon.

also, i love this ring:

i can't decide which i like better, the black or the blue.

what i've been listening to lately:

i bought the entire indiana album by jon mclaughlin from itunes.
one ~ the beatles.
"losing my way" ~ j.t.

peace love harmony.