口紅と時間

十月の終わり、十一月の始めだったでしょうか。何年も使っていた口紅がとうとう無くなってしまいました。

この口紅は、私が最初にお化粧をし始めた頃、バイト先のマネージャーが私にくれた物でした。おそらくもう十年近く前の事。きっとそんなに長い時間同じ口紅を使っていたら、体に悪いですよね・・

何しろ私は口紅を使うスピードが遅くて、いくつか他の口紅ももらったり、買ったり・・・で結局使い切るのが今年やっとになってしまいました。

はっきりは言えませんが、一歩、小さく前に進んだ感じです。今度日本にいったら、同じ会社の口紅を買います、絶対。こだわる程の事でもないかもしれませんが、私にとっては嬉しい思い出。次に選ぶ色が楽しみです。

After the Election

I think I'm ready to talk about the election now. Or, rather, about what will happen now that the election has ended, and ended the way it did. Or, rather, about what is happening, or what has been happening, since the primaries months and months ago.

But before that, I'm going to talk about my students. At the end of October, a couple of weeks before the election, my students from the Anime Club hosted a maid café. I'd never been to a maid café, even while I was living in Japan, so I was a bit tickled to be losing my maid café virginity here in California.

This maid café was a lot of fun, and very, very souped up. And get this—the students gave me an Attack on Titan scarf!! OK, supposedly I won it in a raffle, because paying for your entrance got you a raffle ticket (or two, I have no idea). But the raffle was rigged, I tell you—RIGGED!!! In fact, it was very Japanese of them to make it so that the club advisor won the raffle on the first go... kind of embarrassing, but very cute.

Cooking School / 料理教室

We've been watching Food Network's Worst Cooks in America on Netflix, and I'm starting to think that I should take my lack of cooking skills more seriously. With all the cookbooks in my house, I must be able to find explanations of basic cooking skills—cutting, boiling, baking, braising.

But what is so appealing about Worst Cooks is the presence of Chefs Anne and Bobby (at least in the seasons we've been watching)—entertaining people who are also really great chefs. The show gives me hope that, even for someone like me, a teacher may actually do the trick of teaching me to cook properly.

AAA #2: More Thoughts for the Application Stage of the Academic Job Search

It's...been over two months since I last wrote a post?! Well, I suppose I can pretend like I'd been actually "working" that whole time...

As we get closer to the early-ish deadlines for humanities jobs, I realized that I hadn't written about two specific documents that are (often) a part of the application packet submitted for job calls: the cover letter and the teaching statement.

These are, as always, my personal opinions—so do disregard what seems inappropriate for you or the jobs for which you are applying. I'll have more thoughts later about phone interviews and campus visits—which you will be offered if you do your due diligence, present yourself as fitting the position, and also have a heavy sprinkle of luck!

Drinking Coffee

At the 2007 CCCC I went to the exhibitors' hall on the last day and scored myself some free books. One of them was a short story collection by ZZ Packer titled Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, which I finished reading...finally, just a few days ago.

The collection is wonderful, and I hope you get to read it one day if you haven't already. Please don't think that it'll take you nine years to finish it—once I got started, I was done with it in just a few days.

The titular story is about a woman who enters an Ivy League school as a freshman and learns—and is made to reaffirm—all the injustices tied to being black, female, and queer (though she doesn't identify herself in all of those categories).

AAA #1: 7 Considerations for the Application Stage of the Academic Job Search

This past year I had the chance to serve on a search committee for a tenure-track position in my department. I learned so much in the process, that I wanted to write a few posts about the experience before I forgot about it.

Thus the start of a new series, American Academia Awesomeness—because, you know, at some point I have to leave my Grad School stage behind.

Whatever I write, as always, is my personal opinion—from my perspective, my department, my college, my university. But if any of this is helpful for people, that would be great.

This post is about the application stage in the academic job search process. I'll write posts about other stages later.

Here are my personal thoughts about how people submit applications to academic job searches—as well as what might go in the content.

I threw out food the other day.

Which never happens, seriously.

When I was growing up, my mother—like many others who manage the household food budget—was careful not to let food spoil. Certainly not produce, but of course not dishes that had been prepared. There is good luck in leftovers, as they say, so we had a lot of meals where we pulled out all the nearly-dead-but-still-living things in the fridge and made stir-fry or soup or whathaveyou with them for dinner.

The "not throwing food away" mentality extended to "food" we got when we went out as well—you know, ketchup and soy sauce packets from fast food places, little pots of wasabi if we bought California rolls at the grocery store. I mean, we can't very well throw them away, can we?! This of course explains why I think that mold can just be "cut away" and the salvaged item eaten in a jiffy on the day it's discovered—and also the reason why I had the toughest time throwing away packets of colored sugar pellets that came in boxes of gluten-free baking mixes I'd been using since last February.

What do you even call those? (OK, the box says they're called "sanding sugar".) I mean...I think they're sweet? Maybe they're made of "sugar"? I'm not sure. But the important point was that it was "food", not unlike sugar, so of course I should be able to find a way to use them, no? Like maybe use them to top off a cup of Greek yogurt in order to turn a perfectly healthy snack into some artificial grossness, or use them to sweeten herbal tea, so that something that was supposed to help me unwind would now end up giving me some grave illness. I don't know.

But I've been watching all these food documentaries lately, and I've noticed the weather warming up—so I thought to myself: Self, you need to stop eating crap; you need to get that Summer Body that all the online listicles keep talking about! (Because apparently a Summer Body is supposed to appear around Summer Solstice and then gradually dissolve into ugly holiday sweaters.)

So I finally went and threw away all the packets of "sanding sugar" I'd collected over time and welcomed the warming weather with open arms. (I'm pretty certain my mother would wonder why the hell I didn't throw those packets away months ago.) But that of course meant baking another batch of gluten-free cookies, to celebrate! And if you know anything about me, you know that I am so cooking/baking-challenged that I need a mix even to bake cookies. But the adjustments I made to the required ingredients were so genius that I have to record them here:


What Was Formerly Known as "Snowman Buttons" (but this product was discontinued a while ago and it's kind of a mystery why I still have it)

1 box of Glutino cookie baking mix
7–8 tbsp of olive oil
1 overripe banana
1–2 tbsp soy milk
Lots of nutmeg

Mix and bake at 350ºF for 10 minutes and then take out of the oven 2 minutes later. This will solve all the problems of crumbly dryness that I had been bringing upon these poor guys for the last, well, year.


Apparently I'd purchased 48 boxes of these damn mixes at a deep discount of about $2.25 per box—when the retail price is $5.50. Hooray! Now if only I'd found a way to use those sanding sugars... Well, at least now I'm a step closer to getting that Summer Body in time for Thanksgiving.