April Inventory

What the heck happened to April? It was busy and I was gone a lot, that's for sure. Plus it's spring and the end of the semester, so the only thing I can expect of myself is to be flighty. This post will be more photos than words, too, since I have two term papers to write before Wednesday. Yikes! I finished teaching and gave the exam. I really liked this bunch of students and will miss them. I'm surprised at how much I enjoyed teaching logic, too.

At the beginning of the month I presented at the Philosophy at Play conference at the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham, England. (You can find the abstracts here.) It was my first "grown-up" conference and I'm pleased with how it went. The mix was mostly between playworkers or practioners and philosophers. I think it was the first time I've gone to lectures that I understood and felt like I could respond to intelligently, so that was pretty nice. I'm not sure I learned very much about the particular figures I'm working on, but the conversations and other questions raised were quite fruitful.

The hotel I stayed in was crazy. The curtains looked as if someone had skinned a Muppet, but it was comfortable enough.  Unfortunately I didn't get to spend much time in Cheltenham or England since I had already missed a week of classes (a conference that runs from Monday to Wednesday is bizarre) and it was expensive. Na ja.

Since I've been home from the conference, it's been serious non-stop running. I did manage to squeeze in the FFwD Chocolate Eclairs. I'm not sure how I managed to make them so tiny and they were surprisingly easy to make. I'd never made pate a choux and I was excited by how instantly it came together. I think I'm beginning to trust myself as a baker a lot more now. I had chocolate ganache left over from making these cupcakes the week before, so I just drizzled it on top. In hindsight, I probably ought to have let the ganache warm up a bit more so it looked better, but it tasted fine. The boys polished them off in record time.

And then it was Easter! And I went home to Kansas, where it was cold and a very late spring. Thanks a lot, Kansas. Going home this late in the semester seemed like a terrible idea, especially since I was writing a paper while in the airport, on the plane, and waking up two hours before the rest of the family to squeeze work in, but it was absolutely worth it. I feel more like myself when I get to go home. My family likes to go bumming (Is this a phrase other people use? It sound kind of terrible, but it occurs to me that it might be derivative of the German "bummeln,"  which means to stroll around, go window shopping, that sort of thing, which what we do.) We all got new sandals and drove around to look at houses in the Kansas City area. We missed Ken a whole, whole lot.

Betsy made the above cake out of Melissa Gray's All Cakes Considered. Seriously, what is better than combining npr with baking? Not much, and the cake is proof. I made a bunch of chocolate chip cookies to distribute to people back in Atlanta. Betsy was competing with her boyfriend to see who could make the best cookies, so I helped her a bit, too. Her boyfriend was not allowed to receive any help from his mother, since she's a pastry chef. Betsy was dissatisfied with her cookies, I guess, and entered my cookies as her own. They tied with her boyfriend's, but then it was revealed that he had received help, and was disqualified. Betsy didn't bother to reveal that she had no hand in making her cookies and ended up winning. What a bunch of stinkers!

On Monday I made the Bistrot Paul Bert pepper steak to celebrate Andrew's successful thesis defense. Huzzah! The weather was warm, so we sat out in the backyard. Not bad for a Monday, eh? I wasn't especially wowed by the sauce. I had thought about flambéing it, but we were frying frites one pot over, so that seemed like a VERY BAD IDEA. I'd never made fries before and they went off without incident. I think we were both quite pleased with how it turned out. The dinner was really just lovely. We were both in particularly good moods and it was the perfect temperature out and it was the first time in a while that we really cooked together. Perfect.

I'm pretty stoked for this summer. I'm moving back home at the end of May, since I won't be in Atlanta really until February or March. In June, Betsy and I are going to Turkey for ten days. A classmate of mine has family there and will be in Istanbul while we're there and has very generously offered to show us around. Then I'll be in Italy for three weeks in July for the Collegium Phaenomenologicum, which is a series of lecture courses and text seminars led by some excellent people in my field. Actually, this year's theme is so closely related to my research that I can barely contain myself with excitement. The rest of the summer will be spent working on my dissertation prospectus. I have a committee now, so it's becoming more real as the days go by, especially since I'm now finished with coursework! I received a fellowship to be in Freiburg for the fall semester doing research. That's the plan, at least. 

She knows, she knows! She sings, she sings!

It might be the Catholic in me that thinks of spring as the start of a new year, or it could be that I usually find out in the spring what will happen in the coming academic year, so it feels like the start of something new, or it could be that a fair number of relationships have begun or ended in the spring. Yet while the start of something new, nothing makes me quite as nostalgic and overcome. Yes, Mez, it is springtime Katie. And these memories led me to read my old opendiary entries (and thought it was a good idea to share them with Andrew?). I've been working on the same  philosophical problems for nine years now. I wish I could have an organic food night to go along with it and that we could all frolic in MoBot for a while.

I posted this in OD on April 1, 2002, and I'm writing a paper on the topic again this semester:

Catch only what you've thrown yourself, all is
mere skill and little gain;
but when you're suddenly the catcher of a ball
thrown by an eternal partner
with accurate and measured swing
towards you, to your center, in an arch
from the great bridgebuilding of God:
what catching then becomes a power--
not yours, a world's.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, cited in the fronticepiece to Gadamer's Truth and Method


It's funny that only this time I realized the emphasis on world, rather than individual, play.

And this Rilke, from The Sonnets to Orpheus, I found for the first time yesterday:
XXI
Spring has returned. The earth resembles
a little girl who has memorized
many poems....For all the trouble
of her long learning, she wins the prize.

Her teacher was strict. We loved the white
in the old man's beard and shaggy eyebrows.
Now, whatever we ask about
the blue and the green, she knows, she knows!

Earth, overjoyed to be out on vacation,
play with the children. We long to catch up,
jubilant Earth. The happiest will win.

What her teacher taught her, the numberless Things,
and what lies hidden in stem and in deep
difficult root, she sings, she sings!

And this, which stings a bit:
VIII
You playmates of mine in the scattered parks of the city,
small friends from a childhood of long ago:
how we found and liked one another, hesitantly,
and, like the lamb with the talking scroll,

spoke with our silence. When we were filled with joy,
it belonged to no one: it was simply there.
And how it dissolved among all the adults who passed by
and in the fears of the endless year.

Wheels rolled past us, we stood and stared at the carriages;
houses surrounded us, solid but untrue--and none
of them ever knew us. What in that world was real?

Nothing. Only the balls. Their magnificent arches.
Not even the children... But sometimes one,
oh a vanishing one, stepped under the plummeting ball.