Homegrown Cuisine Survey

Super quick post to do a super quick survey of foreign and native Californian/US food-appreciators alike: I'm making a big dinner on Wednesday night at 20:30, which would be 11:30 in the morning for those of you in the Pacific Standard Time Zone. So answer before then!

What is good California food? What is good US food? I was thinking chili and cornbread, but I don't like chili, rice-stuffed avocados (found a good-looking recipe), guacamole with weird chips (weird because we're in Italy), split-pea soup, something with strawberries (thinking about Watsonville), something with artichokes (thinking about Castroville)....any of those sound like winners? I don't think I have time to make dessert as well, but if you have an easy suggestion, shoot.

So far I have four confirmed guests, but we could get up to nine or ten and I want to let our peculiar blend of fusion cuisine shine for these folks. Recipes are welcome if they've had success.

In other current events, I am done with my tests. I learned a lot of things and I'm still recovering. So far I'm really liking my new classes, especially history of urbanization. I think when I'm bored with being a brilliant linguistics researcher, I'm going to go into environmentally-friendly city planning. I'm also taking Spanish linguistics...get this, within a month, I'll be giving an oral exam in Spanish! Sometimes I'm my own worst enemy. And I'm taking applied linguistics; the prof likes bashing Noam Chomsky but I'm faithful to the number one linguistic revolutionary of the century. And in the meanwhile, I'm learning how to do a new kind of linguistics research using computer programs.

Tomorrow I start a mini-teaching project at a local high school: the topic? Renewable energy resources. Yay for the spread of knowledge!

And my other latest news is a collaboration with a certain professoressa Bragaglia, who is preparing a speech about food and cinema for Princeton in English with which I am helping her. In exchange, she, a member of Slow Food (http://www.slowfood.com/), is giving me cooking lessons.

Until next time...

Last week I jumped out of a plane. Well, hypothetically. Well, mentally. I sat down at the desk, breathed deeply, double-checked my pen grip, tried to settle the nausea rising from my stomach, and opened my eyes to look at the four prompts to choose from for this essay I was supposedly going to write. That's when I fell out of the plane. And wasn't sure if the parachute was strapped on, or if any of the training I had been doing was going to be of use for the five-hour fall towards earth I was going to take, guided by the tip of my pen.

That's what it felt like. I've never felt like I didn't have control before, or like I really wasn't prepared. Or like I would have to bullshit for five hours in Italian for lit professors to read about an author of whose work I had read barely anything. I still can't figure out if I survived the fall or not. But very few more of those jumps are planned in the near future. Just two oral exams and a paper.

I'm going to post new pictures soon. To really capture the essence of my life lately, I should put on my pajamas and turn on my desk light, set up some crumb-covered plates and an empty mug with a dry tea stain at the bottom, hunch over my desk with ten books stacked up in front of me, flip wildly through my dictionary and have someone come take pictures. That's really been the essence of my life in the last month or so. A presto, cari amici.