Games for grown-ups

My best friend HEB and I both have a deep love for games. I'm not sure when this came about, but it was definitely high school and later. I don't like most usual games people know

Carcassonne

This is a lovely little game that involves choosing a tile, and building roads and cities. It's 30-45 minutes long. It can be played calmly, sort of in a simultaneous solitaire (as HE, or it can be played cut throat, trying to steal each others' cities and roads (as Samir and I play).






Word Thief

This is personally one of my all-time favorite games! You get seven cards, which are letters. Each card is a suit (regular suits: clubs, hearts, etc). On your turn you spell words with your cards. If your word is spelled with letters of different suits, another player can take your work on their turn. This is a seriously fun game!

Music to quiet myself

I have recently fallen back in love with South African music. Since first introduced by my best friend HEB after her study abroad in Cape Town, I always loved it. I don't buy much music, however, and so my reliance on the radio didn't help feed my interest.

Recently, I have come back to South African music. Life has been more stressful and draining than usual for the past few months, for a variety of reasons. South African music is so calming and peaceful to me. I can't quite pinpoint why, it just has that effect on me.

If you are in need of some rest and calm, I recommend these.

First there is Vusi Mahlasela, a sort of folksie, Indie South African singer. You can listen to several of his songs at his myspace page.
http://www.myspace.com/vusimahlasela
I really love "Everytime."

Next, there is one of my favorites of all time, Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Sadly, I missed their live performance at Princeton a few years ago. I post this not for the video, but just for the music. (I don't know any other way to listen to music online).





I could listen to this music for hours (and sometimes I do!)

Goals as a 25 year old

My birthday was on Friday, and at dinner I jokingly started coming up with some goals for my year as a 25-year-old.

Here's what I came up with:
1. Visit a new continent.
This will be surprisingly easy for me because I am going to India on a Princeton fellowship in December! So it's not much of a goal, since it's for sure going to be done. But hey, it's attainable!

2. Start a book.
Originally the goal was to write a book, but when I talked to one of Samir's friends who is in the process of writing a book, the look he gave me made me decide that a better goal is to start a book. I'm not talking about an academic book. Subject matter, genre, etc. to be decided. But hey, I'd like to say I wrote a book.

3. Get married.
Again, totally attainable since it's planned for happening June 1, 2008. Perhaps the goal will be to pull off the wedding as stress free as possible. I'm well on my way to that goal as well, considering that we have rented out a summer camp for the weekend and plan to have a totally untraditional, super fun weekend wedding.

That's all! I guess writing a book is my only "real" goal, in that I will have to work for it. But hey, all of them are pretty big things. Here's to year 25.

VALF endorsed candidate: Barack Obama

I love Barack Obama. I find him inspiring, new, and different. I like his rhetoric of unity, unlike other candidates who ignore this topic. I think he would make a great president. I also think it is high time we had a minority president.

I am also a big supporter of various feminist causes, and so I'm not against Hilary. I'm just pro-Obama. I also think it's time for a change. I read a crazy statistics: 116 million Americans have never lived under a president other than a Bush or Clinton. Many have commented on how the dominance of the two families in national politics is unprecedented. While I like the Clintons, I think it's time for a complete change, something new and refreshing. Another reason I support Barack. I do think he would be a new face, and take national politics in new directions. It would be refreshing!

One more: I think Barack can win. He's not a divisive candidate, at least not in the recent sense of the word. I think he could win a general election and give us a president that doesn't polarize the country for 4 or 8 more years. I think many other candidates would have that effect.

So, now it's out there: my publicly endorsed candidate. I probably have not done justice to my passion on this, but I am very passionate. BARACK IN 2008!!! Does that do it? Just read some of his speeches, and you may be swayed as well. Here is one I love, his speech anouncing his candidacy.

Life stories

Well, I'm going to attempt to bring the blog back to life.

An interesting tidbit for my Houston friends is that life stories are back in my life. The tradition of telling life stories was started by Chris and Lisa Seay, as far as I can tell, and basically involves telling the unabridged story of your life. Yes, a two-hour story narrative, with props if you want, horrors and joys of life all included. The small groups at Ecclesia, my Houston church, almost all partook in this. It was really touching to get to know people so deeply, hearing about their entire lives.

This tradition has now been brought to Princeton, NJ. I meet with a group of girls here every Wednesday night. The group was started three years ago as a Bible study, but now has evolved mostly to just a weekly girls' night. We get together, have some snacks or desserts, share about what's going on in our lives, support each other, discuss issues on our minds. It's a wonderful community that is totally "organic" and has stayed strong the past few years. I recently told the girls about the idea of life stories, and people were keen on it. We've done four now, and they are just beautiful. Beautiful! Our friend Krista shared this week, and it was amazing. I could relate to her about things I never knew we had in common, and I was reminded how much I love hearing these life stories.

Krista said at the end of the night that she thinks it's the anecdotal nature of our lives that make them so compelling. I have come to believe that stories are incredibly powerful. We learn through stories, connect through stories, share through stories. Movies and novels are all stories, as is history. I almost feel like I'm connecting to an ancient tradition when we tell life stories, or stories of our lives. Stories just resonate, are remembered, are felt. Long live our stories!

Holy crap, cancer is scary.

I recently found out that a good friend has a horrible kind of cancer. Not that there are any "good" cancers out there, but there are operable cancers, treatable cancers, manageable cancers. This cancer is ferocious, horrible, mostly inoperable. The five year survival rate is 30%.

It's a freak case. People who get this cancer have an average age of nearly 70, and my friend isn't even 30. The doctors have all said they have never seen or heard of a case like this.

My friend is going with the most ambitious route to get rid of the cancer, a surgery that is the best recommendation from doctors consulted all around the country. The dangerous part is that the procedure has a 20-40% mortality rate. Holy crap.

First I cried, and then I was generally shell shocked. I felt small and my own problems felt smaller (as cliche as that is... it's totally true). Then I felt at a loss. What could I do? All I want to do is help, but how? What can I possibly do? Sure, "be a good friend", "be supportive". Do you know how ridiculously meager that feels in the face of what my friend is facing? How much it feels that can hardly express the care and concern I feel?

I can't believe I made it

So, the way graduate school works is something like this. You show up, take 2-3 years of classes, and somewhere at the end of year 2 or end of year 3 write a master's thesis. Then somewhere in years 2-4 (after you are finished all your coursework and after you have finished your master's paper) you study for a few semesters and take exams. They are called various things: comprehensive exams, qualifying exams, general exams, area exams. Basically you read everything ever written in your two main fields of study then take a massive exam on it, unless you go to Princeton and then you read everything ever written in THREE fields and take a massive exam.

Well, years of coursework and 1 master's paper later, my exams are here! I recently numbered my reading lists and discovered I had around 250 books and articles that I was supposed to have read specifically for my two exams today. I did manage to make it through the vast majority of that reading, amazingly!

And now the test! I have 24 hours straight of open book essay writing fun, followed by an oral exam on Wednesday. I'm off to start in less than an hour. Woopeee!!!!!