But this? This right here? This right here is Momofuku’s pork buns and is perhaps as close to food nirvana as you might hope to get.
(Can you figure out what I had for dinner tonight? OM NOM NOM. I had it at Marc and Kate’s and was just bowled over. I must make these soon, once I move, unpack, and get a bit settled. Because this is the sort of dish that dreams (delicious, pork filled dreams) are made of.)
Posted in General.
I defended my dissertation on Monday! And passed! It was quite a lot of fun, actually. Many of the questions were hard, but they were about issues in the dissertation that I’ve worried a lot about and the discussions had were quite productive and helpful. And, besides, I got to talk to utterly brilliant people about Plato for a couple of hours. How can that not be fun?!
The defense was on Monday. Yesterday I made the final revisions, fixing up typos and trying to beat the dissertation into the formatting required by the University. I should hear from the auditor tomorrow about whether it needs any formatting tweaks. Let’s hope not…because formatting that dissertation to the required specifications was not exactly the most pleasant of experiences.
But still! Done!
!!
Now I turn to the final push for packing. I’m leaving a week from today, though the bulk of my furniture and such will be packed up on Saturday. Yikes! I’m terribly excited to go. I’m looking forward to moving to Washington and to a really fantastic little town. I’m terribly excited to get started at Whitman and getting to know my lovely new colleagues. And, um, I’m really excited that I get to have a real job with a real paycheck. :)
But. But I’m going to miss the people here in Tucson something terrible. And I’m going to miss the mountains to the north, that I get to see every single day. And I’m going to miss the delicious cheap Mexican food that you can find on every corner. And while I certainly won’t miss the 100 degree days that our weathermen describe as “cool”, I may just find myself missing Tucson in February. Mostly, though, it’s about the people. It’ll be hard to say goodbye to my friends and mentors in the city.
But, still, I’m excited about moving on. These seven years here in Tucson have been fantastic…and I’m sure that life in Walla Walla will be just as good, if not better. (I just have to get there. And, to that end, I go back to packing!)
Posted in General.
I was about to complain about the weather. (It’s been miserable this week.) But, meh. Complaining about how hot it is during a Tucson summer is a lot like complaining about how cold it is during an Alaskan winter — it’s something that you do but, I mean, it’s not like it’s surprising or anything.
So let me say instead: AAAAH! Time is running short, people!
There are THREE DAYS until my dissertation defense. THREE. TRES. TROIS. DREI. (OK, you get the idea.) You know what this means? I’m rereading it. To remind myself of what I’m committed to. And to check for typos for the millionth (or fourth) time.
I finally wrote my acknowledgments. That’s good. I had to do it at home instead of a coffeeshop, though, because I kept starting to cry and then would get self-conscious. Who’d have thought that the stage of my dissertation that finally led to tears was the acknowledgments. Oof.
Anways. THREE DAYS to the defense.
And also? And also there are THIRTEEN DAYS until I leave Arizona. You’d think that my house would be further packed in light of this fact. You’d think, but you’d be wrong in so thinking. I haven’t even touched my kitchen yet. It’s like a big lumbering beast just waiting ready to pounce. Or, if not pounce, then serve as a clear example of what happens when you don’t move for long enough that you accumulate an extraordinary amount of stuff. (Did I really need those three dozen cookie cutters? I’m thinking the answer is no.) I’m hoping maybe Sunday I can begin to tackle it. If I’m finished rerererereading the dissertation, that is.
At least I got my hair chopped off. Getting a haircut is enough to feel productive for at least three days. It’s now only an inch and a half (maybe two inches?) long. Much better for surviving these miserably hot days.
And with that, we move full circle, back to complaining about the weather.
Posted in General.
I finished the dissertation. (!!) It’s now in the hands of my committee, and I’m rather nervously awaiting the defense, on July 19th. Turning in the dissertation was such a strange experience for me. I’m proud of it. It’s something I’ve worked hard on and I think that I’ve learned a lot – both about Plato and about how to write about Plato – while writing it. And I think that I say some pretty cool stuff in it. But I also see the dissertation as a remarkably flawed document. I read it and think about what I could do if I could start over and write an entirely new dissertation on the same subject. There are so many ways that I could improve it. Things to improve that, alas, I didn’t have the time to do with what I turned in. So there was this strange mix of pride tempered with knowledge it could be better, with a healthy dose of worry about what my committee will think of it.
That was almost a week ago. (?!!! ?! !!) Since then I’ve caught up a bit on sleep and have starting packing. I snapped these pictures last night as I was packing books. (6 boxes of books, for what it’s worth. I thought there’d be more than that but instead it just seems like I had more library books on those shelves than anyone should ever be allowed to have checked out.) Here are some pictures:
and a strange mix of books in this one box:
The rest of this week will involve a lot of packing. Then I’m going to turn back to the dissertation and rereading a few things and doing all that formatting mess that you have to do to appease the University. And, with the way that time has been moving these days, that all will happen within the next few blinks of my eyes.
Posted in General.
This is what happens when I want to keep a note to myself and can’t think of another place where I’ll be able to find it many months in the future when I’ll actually need to look for it. It’s either that or sending an email to myself and, well, that doesn’t always work out so well.
Anyways.
In the past I’ve wondered why the EV characterizes noble sophistry in a way that appears to depict Socrates’ own behavior. Isn’t that evidence that Socrates is a noble sophist? (And, if so, there are a variety of questions about why this is so and what it means for the relationship between Socrates, the EV, and the notion of being a philosopher.)
BUT. I don’t think we need to think that by characterizing some of Socrates’ actions as noble sophistry, the EV (and Plato by extension) is calling Socrates a sophist. Socrates’ is guided by two motivations: a love of wisdom and a divine command to exhort. When acting from this second motivation, he might rightly be considered a noble sophist. But that does not exhaust his actions. Quite frequently we see him act qua philosopher. And in these times he’s not acting as a noble sophist but instead as a philosopher.
After all, recall that at the beginning of the Sophist the EV notes that sometimes philosophers take on the appearance of sophists. The appearance of the sophist in the sixth definition is Socrates’ appearance as a sophist. And he appears that way when he is acting qua moral evangelist.
(I think a similar line of reasoning can be given about the midwife passage/characterization in the Theaetetus. Socrates is complex.)
Posted in Ancient Philosophy, Philosophy, Plato is awesome!.
Why a picture of a smoothie? It certainly wasn’t a special smoothie – just some frozen berries from a bag and a bit of yogurt and milk, blended together in happy harmony. No, this is a picture of a smoothie because it represents, at least in my head, what final revisions to a dissertation look like.
My life recently has looked like this: get up, go to a coffee shop and work. Come home and grab lunch while rereading portions of the final-final1 revisions. Go back to the coffee shop and work some more. Come home and sleep. Wake up in the middle of the night worrying about stuff or having a eureka moment about how to say something in some paragraph of some chapter. Go back to sleep. Wake up and repeat.
And today I realized that I hadn’t had any fruit for at least three days. This is mainly because I’ve not gone to the grocery store. And because the bananas at Starbucks are always quite dodgy looking. And because I can’t figure out how three days have passed so quickly. So to get vitamins and those other things that tend to be found in fruit, I made, well, that.
Which brings me to the obviously false judgment for the day: finishing up one’s dissertation is a reason for being married. Why? How much better would this be if I had someone to clean my house for me! And cook for me! And do the dishes!! !!! (What? Marriage isn’t about those sorts of things? Pshaw, I saw. Pshaw indeed.) But no. Instead I am counting on Starbucks coffee2, Trader Joe’s gnocchi alla sorrentina, and lots and lots of cereal to see me through this week. Maybe another smoothie, while I’m at it.
And, for fun, here are a couple more pictures from my week. First, the cute and cuddly Dusty, helping me work.
And then, a picture showing how hot it was in my house last Saturday. My swamp cooler was broken. And the sad thing? This wasn’t the peak of the heat. It topped out at 96-7 degrees in my house. This is enough to make for one Very. Grumpy. Michelle.
Posted in General.
I’ve been reminded by my mother recently that I have neglected my blog. This is, without a doubt, true. So, *waves*, “hello blog!”.
There.
Sorry. Things are busy over here. Like they have been all year, I guess. Except it keeps getting busier and, unfortunately, hours aren’t added to the day to make up for it.
Here’s what my schedule looks like from here on out, so at least you can understand a bit of the internet silence:
July 3 – final draft of dissertation due
July 19 – dissertation defense
July 29 – leave Tucson
August 2 – arrive in Walla Walla.
In the mix of all of that, I need to figure out what I’m moving and how I’m moving it. (I guess I should get on that.) I also want to spend time with friends, since this is the last time we’ll all be living in the same city together. And did I mention the World Cup is currently going on?
I just keep telling myself that somehow things work out. Everything will get done. The move will go as smoothly as moves tend to go. The cats will be disgruntled about being in a car for three days, but that’s ok. I’m not butchering Plato too badly with my crazy (but true!) views. Making sure that the formatting is correct for the dissertation will only take a few hours. *cough*
OK. Back to the trenches. It’s just me, Plato, and coffee. And my swamp cooler. Because…you know…Tucson. Summertime. Heat. Oof.
Posted in General.
Lucky is getting to spend your days thinking about, puzzling about, writing about, and exulting in Plato. Getting to do that means that you are very, very lucky.
(I shall now return to the Republic, which is most definitely one of the most amazing things ever to have emerged from mankind.)
Posted in General.
I’m in the process of making the final revisions to the dissertation in preparation for submitting it to my committee exactly one month from today. (Let’s ignore that making the final revisions to my chapters on the Republic appears to involve completely rewriting the chapters, shall we?)
At the moment I’m working on a section that draws heavily from book six. And there’s a passage in book six that’s puzzling. It’s at 490c, and Socrates is talking. He’s just described the philosopher’s intellectual endeavors. Actually, it’s one of my very favorite bits of the Republic, so let me just quote it. He says: “It is the nature of the real lover of learning to struggle toward what is, not to remain with any of the many things that are believed to be, that, as he moves on, he neither loses nor lessens his erotic love until he grasps the being of each nature itself with the part of his soul that is fitted to grasp it, because of its kinship with it, and that, once getting near what really is and having intercourse with it and having begotten understanding and truth, he knows, truly lives, is nourished and – at that point, but not before – is relieved from the pains of giving birth?”
Yowsers.
Anyways. Just after this he asks Glaucon whether such a nature could ever follow from such a nature. Glaucon says no. Then we get our peculiar passage. Socrates asks “But rather a healthy and just character, with moderation following it.” Glaucon agrees. (And, for Greek readers, here it is: ἀλλ᾽ ὑγιές τε καὶ δίκαιον ἦθος, ᾧ καὶ σωφροσύνην ἕπεσθαι.)
Here’s the question: why does he say that moderation will follow the (already healthy and just) character? One’s character cannot be just without being moderate, after all. That, at least, seems to be one of the take home messages from the discussion of virtue in book four.
Can the ‘ᾧ’ refer to something other than ‘ἦθος’? Can the ‘ἕπεσθαι’ indicate some other sort of following that doesn’t indicate a temporal or causal priority of justice to moderation?
Anyways. I find this passage perplexing given Socrates’ discussion about virtue and the relationships between the virtues that we find in book four. But I don’t have much to say about it other than a general expression of puzzlement.
Posted in Ancient Philosophy, Philosophy, Plato is awesome!, Plato is confusing.
I got back from two weeks in the eastern Mediterranean on Sunday night. The trip was just fantastic. We began in Rome, spending two days wandering around the city. Highlights included a visit to San Clemente, a morning at the Vatican museums, and a stop by the Colosseum.
We then went to Pisa for half a day and then went to Florence, where we spent a day. Florence is just lovely. I’d love to spend a week or two just enjoying the city there and a few other towns in Tuscany.
Finally we went up to Venice. We spent a day and a half in Venice (and Murano and Burano, two nearby towns/islands) before getting on the cruise. By that point I was quite exhausted and a bit cranky. I was definitely ready to be pampered a bit and spend some time reading in the sun instead of speeding through various sites!
The cruise itself was lovely. We stopped at four ports on the seven day cruise.
Dubrovnik, Croatia:
Kusadasi, Turkey (with a tour that took us to Ephesus, Magnesia, the temple of Apollo in Didyma, and Miletus):
Santorini, Greece:
Corfu, Greece:
The weather left quite a bit to be desired. It rained in three of four of our ports of call – in Dubrovnik, Kusadasi (the greatest tragedy! We missed at least half of the city of Ephesus because of rain, hail, and a pretty amazing thunderstorm), and Corfu. This cat is a pretty decent representation of what we looked like (and felt like) much of the time:
But rain won’t kill you. And it was a really lovely time, regardless. We capped off the trip with a simply stunning day in Venice on Saturday. The weather was about as perfect as you could hope for, and the city itself is just beautiful.
Two weeks was just about the perfect amount of time. By the end I was pretty eager to get home, see my cats, and sleep in my own bed again. But it really was just fantastic getting to see all sorts of beautiful things and places, meet a lot of really lovely people, and have some of the best espresso I’ve ever had in my life. For now, though, real life is coming back with a vengeance. I have two months to get everything done and ready to move. In two months and a week, I should be leaving Tucson and starting the drive up to Washington. Yikes! So I suppose I should start to figure out what I need to do and in what order in order for that to happen. Ciao!
Posted in General.
I’m off tomorrow for a couple weeks in Europe. My wonderful mother is treating me to a week in Italy and then a week long cruise in the Mediterranean, with stops in Croatia, Turkey, and Greece. It’s a graduation present for finishing up my PhD. Yay! There may be posts with pretty pictures, there may not be…it all depends on internet access and if I can steal away a bit of time on my mom’s computer. (I will be two whole weeks without my computer. How will I cope?! I shall have to console myself with beautiful statues, lovely frescos in old churches, and gelato.)
Have a lovely couple of weeks, oh internet-land!
Posted in General.
Whenever I’m really on a roll with something…in the middle of working through a complicated argument or writing a key section of the chapter…when it’s all flowing really well and the answers and sentences and passages are all coming quickly…it’s all I can do to keep writing. I don’t get immersed in my work. Indeed, I have an almost overwhelming urge to stop. To go do something else. To go out and take a walk, or get up and refill my cup of coffee, or find my cats and pet them, or check out my Facebook page. It’s all I can do to stay at my computer and actually write. Even though when I do, it goes quickly and (relatively) effortlessly. Even though writing in such times is a real pleasure and doing philosophy is quite fun and I’m actually enjoying myself. Why is it that when writing is most fun I also have the strongest urge to stop?!
I have no idea why…I find it strange. Especially because I always hear of these people who, when they’re on a roll, enter their zone and stay there and notice nothing else only to emerge hours later with pages upon pages written. I think I’m just about the opposite of that.
Anyways…people are strange. And people’s working habits are strange. And writing a dissertation is strange.
And yet it is also so much fun sometimes.
I’m now going back to working on that dissertation. I’m at a good place. I’ve got five days to get this chapter re-write finished and I can totally do it. If only I can resist the urge to get up and take a walk.
Posted in General.
It’s mighty beautiful here in Tucson these days. Our days are warm without being too hot – about 85 degrees – while the nights still get pleasantly cool. And basically everything that can flower is currently flowering. Yay!
Posted in General.
Largely because it’s completely what I was craving and is just wonderful. It’s just a basic chopped salad:
In it we’ve got:
* green leaf lettuce
* red onion
* radish
* celery
* carrot
* tomato
* garbanzo beans
* ham
* swiss cheese
* white wine vinaigrette
It is, I assure you, full of tasty deliciousness.
Posted in General.
I’m at a coffee shop. I was doing quite well working at home for the last couple of months, but recently it hasn’t been working out. So back to the coffee shop I go.
Right now I’m at a nice little local place. Not the best coffee in town, but a lot of room to work and outlets for the computer. It’s the small things. Also, they have 50 cent refills, which is quite nice…though I end up jittery when I leave. (Did you know that if you have a rewards card, you get free refills at Starbucks?! Worth knowing…even if their coffee isn’t nearly as tasty as the local coffee shops.)
The chapter re-writing is going fairly well. (No thanks to Plants v. Zombies. Flash games are surely a counterexample to Plato’s thought that we always do what we think is best for us. There is such a thing as akrasia and put me in front of a flash game and I will exhibit it.) I have two weeks to finish the revisions and I’m quite hopeful it’ll get done. I have the easy stuff done (heh) and am going to turn now to the discussion of the philosopher’s activities. In asking that about the aporetic dialogues you wade into a whole slew of a mess of a disaster dealing with whether we see Socrates ever employ one specific method and then whether what Socrates does can be characterized as inquiry. (I just read an article pertaining to the question of whether Socrates engages in inquiry that was just about the opposite of what I believe. I had the experience of wondering whether me and the author read the same dialogues given how different our respective interpretations of the text are. Good times.)
Anyways…there are two weeks to get this chapter done. Between now and then, there is a lot of stuff going on. I’ve got the usual Greek and Latin reading groups (Protagoras in Greek, De Rerum Natura in Latin), a vet appointment, an afternoon talking about teaching with other grad students, a camping trip, and packing for the upcoming trip to Italy.
This can all be done, right? Right. It can be done because it has to be done. It’s amazing how much necessity motivates action!
OK…back to work. (I’m already on cup number three of coffee today. First was an Ethiopian harar. Next a dark Italian roast. Now a much lighter Mexican bean. I think I’m partial to the Ethiopian. Something about harars, when well roasted, that just make me all happy. And twitchy. But mostly happy.) (And how much coffee is too much? I hope I don’t ever find out. It’s unclear to me that I could even write if I didn’t have a cup of coffee sitting next to me.)
(By the by — what’s up with the trend to wear opaque tights with tall boots? I realize I completely lack a fashion sense and so am not one to judge. But still.)
(Apologies about the excessive use of parentheses. I have to get my fill of them somewhere so that I don’t do it in the dissertation, you see.)
Posted in General.
In the last half an hour I have sat here trying to decide
(1) if it’s OK to call Socrates ‘naughty’ at one point.
(2) if it’s OK to swear in my dissertation (a mild ‘damned hard’, nothing too eyebrow raising).
Alas, I’ve decided the answer in both of these cases is ‘no’. One more of these profound dilemmas about the dissertation and I may just take it as definitive evidence that I need to stop thinking about Plato for a few hours. (On the other hand, I am happily including the phrase “Socrates’ tenuous relationship with the truth” in this chapter.)
In other news, I’m working on a different chapter. (There’s a happy dance going on inside my head about this fact.) Goodbye, Eleatic Visitor. Don’t let the door hit you on your way out. I’m working on my chapter on the Aporetic dialogues….which means I get to enjoy Socrates’ fantastic snark and think about a method of inquiry that is far more familiar and loved than that damnable method of collection and division.
Finally, I discovered this today. I’m hoping that it doesn’t absolutely destroy my productivity. I have two and a half weeks to rewrite this draft of the chapter and I’ll need every one of those days in order to do it.
Posted in General.
Yeah. So I haven’t exactly been updating frequently. Know why? Because this is what my days look like:
And when enough of your days look like that then, well, it doesn’t leave much to write about. I’ve been completely rewriting a chapter these last several weeks, which has meant a lot of time in front of the computer trying to get things as I want them.
In addition to working on the dissertation, I’ve been thinking a bit about about my upcoming trip to Italy. My mom and I are going to go to Italy. We’re spending a week traveling through Rome, Florence, and Venice. Then we’re going on a week long cruise stopping in Croatia, Turkey, and Greece. It’ll be two weeks full of beautiful sculptures and old buildings and churches and artwork. I’m getting terribly excited!
I thought I’d also post a couple of recipes. It’s been ages, eh?
The first is for a roasted cauliflower soup.
It’s basically a head of cauliflower, an onion, some chicken broth, a small bit of blue cheese, and a small dash of milk.
Take a head of cauliflower. Break into small florets. Put them on a sheet pan, drizzle with a wee bit of oil, and then roast in a 400 degree oven for about 20 minutes or so, until it softens a bit. While that’s roasting. Thinly slice an onion and saute it in a small bit of oil, until it’s caramelized. It’ll take about 15-20 minutes to properly caramelize the onions. Add some salt and pepper at this point. Once the cauliflower is roasted, take it out of the oven and add it to the pot with the onions. Add about 6 cups of broth, a couple of bay leaves, and a sprig of thyme. Let that bubble for about 20 minutes. Take out the bay leaves and thyme. Add about 1/4 cup of blue cheese and about 1/2 cup of milk or half and half. Then puree the soup. Let it simmer for about 10 more minutes. Then it’s ready to be eaten!
The soup is very mild, with a slight, but not overwhelming, taste of blue cheese. It’s the sort of soup that you want to dunk a bit of bread in. It’s definitely not a soup I want all the time…but it’s nice every now and again.
Next are some cookies:
These cookies aren’t really cookies. Not really. They’re actually bits of pie crust cut into circles. This is my pie crust recipe of choice. It’s basically foolproof and wonderful. Anyways, to make these cookies all you do is roll out the pie crust and cut out circles (about 4″ in diameter). You then take those circles and put them in a muffin tin, pushing them down into the tin. Basically you’ve got a lot of little pie crusts. Next stick the tin (with the un-filled crusts) in a 400 degree oven for 10 minutes. (You’re par-baking the crusts.) Then take out the crusts. They’ll be poofy. Take some raspberry jam and drop about a teaspoon in each little cup. Sprinkle with some sliced almonds and some cinnamon sugar. Then stick them back in the oven for another 10 minutes. By that time the cookies should be a little golden and the almonds should start to be toasted. Learn from my pain and let these sit for a bit because the jam is hot. Ow ow ow hot.
Ooooh. And take a look at that coffee mug! I got a ‘Welcome to Whitman’ box from my future department yesterday! It had all sorts of lovely things in it, including that coffee mug and a lovely blanket that Dusty has decided that she really likes.
Hurrah! And, erm, back to work for me. Lots to do yet on this dissertation. Lots to do.
Posted in General.
Yeah, the posts have been scarce. This is entirely because my days are all basically the same. They tend to look like this:
Notice that it was a two coffee cup kind of day. (No, not just two cups of coffee. I laugh in the face of just two cups of coffee.) That was actually taken a week ago. Since then I’ve finished major revisions on the chapter I was working on. I’m meeting with my committee tomorrow to talk about the dissertation and, in particular, about that chapter. So we’ll see how acceptable the chapter is then.
Today, though, has been a day of cleaning and baking, because I have some friends coming over to celebrate Pi Day. I’m quickly coming to love Pi Day, because, really, we need to have days that celebrate the joy that is pie. Here’s my pie this year:
It’s a cherry pie and I’m really hoping it tastes as good as it looks. Everyone coming is bringing a pie. I’m excited to see what kinds people bring.
And, finally, one last picture:
That’s my yard! My yard is green! Yay rain! Exclamation marks!
OK, back to cleaning and trying my hardest to not eat a slice of that pie before people show up.
Posted in General.
It comes from the Sophist. Theaetetus is despairing of ever finding the sophist after he’s escaped from them again and again. The Eleatic Visitor tries to keep him motivated, saying:
Even if you can only make a little progress, Theaetetus, you should cheer up. If you give up in this situation, what will you do some other time when you don’t get anywhere or even are pushed back? A person like that would hardly capture a city, as the saying goes. But…the largest wall may already have been captured and the rest of them may be lower and easier. (261bc)
Yes, some days it may feel like you*’ve been pushed back. You lost that wall you thought you took. But take heart. Be cheerful. Keep at it. Someday you’ll capture the city.
*I use the ‘you’ very inclusively. To include me.
Posted in General.
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