Two of My Favoritest Smart People
First of all, Kasia is totally hilarious. Check
this out.
Second, I had a very interesting afternoon today. It was the first day back to reality for my department. The rest of the school has been suffering through their own assortment s of deadlines and draft submissions and what not. The Soc/Anth kids, on the other hand, were released like the hounds to scramble all over the globe for our field work during the month of April, and had our first departmental meeting for thesis writing today, and all 21 of us were crammed back in that corner room on the 4th floor of the Zrinyi building again for the first time since March. After being away in Ukraine for nearly a month, the discomfort of it all felt reassuringly familiar.
Today was also a special day, because
Bruno Latour was a guest of the sociology department this weekend, and he presented a lecture on truth and objectivity in politics in the Monument Building this evening. I have been looking forward to his visit for months, since I have always admired his theoretical works, I have read and been totally confused by his writings since I began studying anthropology in college, and he's a crazy famous big shot.
He talked for a long time about creating sociology as an objective science, on that is bound by the thing that it studies. He said, that even if you are a shitty chemist, it is hard to write poor quality work, because you are so bound by your materials. If you mess up, your lab could explode. Whereas, you could talk circles of crap around cultural ideas. You could BS your way through entire books, and there may be few people to actually call you on it. Thought provoking sentiment--and terribly interesting considering that a large portion of this guys theoretical work has concerned the scientific production of knowledge. People cant BS about laboratory conditions? Its been a few years since I had my safety goggles on and my pipet in hand, but goodness, if there's anything that the natural sciences AREN'T, its exact and natural.
Labels: CEU, grad school, kasia, latour
There was indeed Christmas in Budapest (the booze narrative)
Ok, for starters, this is the first of a series of blog entries that I have been meaning to make for a little while. I'm playing catch up, so bear with me here. Second, I would really like to insist that I have actually NOT been drinking the copious amounts of alcohol that reading this blog might make you think I do. I'm not a drunk, my liver is fine, I just get really excited about liquor sometimes. Really excited. I mean, what do you expect me to do when people bring GORGEOUS stuff like this in to my life?
I mean seriously. SERIOUSLY! I dont even remember what we had for dinner. But I remember every drop of liquid that hit my tongue.
For starters, I had just gotten back from my trip to Warsaw with Kasia. I had brought back an assortment of goodies, including two of my favorite vodkas ever (and I fancy myself kind of a vodka snob, so know that I take these products very seriously.)
The first is
Siwucha, which is apparently a Slavic word for 'moonshine'.
This vodka comes sealed with a cork, and demands commitment. The first time I ever enjoyed this stuff was in Portland when Kasia brought back a bottle, and she and Lauren and I sat on the stoop of the pink house and cleaned the whole thing off in one evening. We didn't move from that stoop for hours, and had the most hilarious time ever. I am so in crazy love with that evening.
Then there is the
Zubrowka, the vodka infused with Bison Grass.
This stuff is so delicious, I can't even tell you. But I can try. It's sooo delicious. It is discussed in Somerset Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge:
It smells of freshly mown hay and spring flowers, of thyme and lavender, and it's soft on the palate and so comfortable, it's like listening to music by moonlight.
Then came the home brew. Kristina was one of our dinner guests/esteemed cooks for the evening. She brought with her a huge bottle of
tuica that her brother had distilled from plums in her backyard in Romania. Oh, wait, maybe I didn't say that clearly enough....ahem
DISTILLED FROM PLUMS THAT GROW WILD IN HER GARDEN IN ROMANIA. My god it was beautiful. It was a strong liquor, like palinka, but so sweet and tart, like the fruit. By the time we drank it, it had little alcohol left in it, because before she served it, she simmered it with black peppercorns and then served it hot. Here, she is going to hate this picture, but its the only one I have of the moment!
We were also serving hot mulled wine and all the beer that could be drug in the door. It was a crazy evening, what with all the food and drink. We had a lot of people over to help too.
Stephen's rad girlfriend Meghan was in town:
As well as Emrah, who was with us for a couple of days from Hospitality Club:
Heh, that guy was a lot of fun. We didn't get nearly enough time to run around while he was here...stupid papers and whatnot.
We also had all of
Tyler's family was in from California as well. It was a full house. For sure. We are still figuring out which leftovers in the fridge are from that day. My goodness.
Labels: E-mrah, hospitality club, hotlinks, house, kasia, Kristina, liquor, Meghan, photos, thin justification for my existace
Letters to the Editor
Kasia offers her "truthy" accounts of my previous "truthy" account of the truth.
basically, i came to the u.s. in 85. i went back once in 86 and once in 87. after 89, i went back every summer until college. in the 7 years since i started reed, i've been back (i think?) 4 times, but never for more than a month.
Also, it's not that Marko and I have the same taste in music. As his friend put it, I have no taste in music. I listen to all kinds of stuff. I am kind of musically retarded. So I'm really, really blown away by people who have very specific tastes in music, and know a lot about it. I'm also intrigued by this "indie rock" thing, because it's a classificatory genre of music that is based around the economics of the music, not the actual quality of music. So Marko offered to edumacate me. And so far, it's working out great.
Finally, I can't believe you tried to front like all we were drinking on that park bench was wine. Trying to make us sound all classy. FESS UP DUDE. WE WAS DRINKIN WEE LITTLE BOTTLES OF HOMELESS HOOCH. AND LOVING IT.
--Kasia
Labels: Budapest, kasia, Marko, music, procrastiation, rabble rousing, Warsaw
...And it was a beautiful thing
I got a Kasia for Christmas. And I absolutely loved it.
I flew to Warsaw on December 19th, and got to spend a few days there with her and her family. It was a fabulous trip. On the one hand I got to see a new city and be shown around by someone I knew. But I also loved it for the opportunity to see the people and places that Kasia holds so close to her self-image.
She has lived with her family all over the place: in Berkeley, DC, Boise, Jersey, even Germany. And every year until she was 16, I think (maybe even later), she would spend the summers with family in Warsaw. She grew up in a truly bi-cultural environment. And, because she moved around so much in the US, for as long as I have known her, Kasia has always contended that the only place where she ever felt at home, because it was the only place she came back to year after year, is Warsaw.
I also got to see Kasia climbing railings like a monkey. And in that moment, it was clear that the world was as it should be.
We slept in through half of the day the whole while I was in town because we were up bothering each other, being addicted to MySpace surveys, and working on schoolwork until 3 or 4 am next to each other on the little fold out couch in her gramma's back office. We spent a little time each day wandering around to see what we could see, but spent hours sitting in cafes and just talking, catching up on all the stories that cant be told over e mail or during our occasional trans-Atlantic drunk dials. We just talked. For hours. Over poorly mixed kirs, overpriced espressos, and the most delicious falafels I have ever had in my life. Which was fitting.
We went to the University of Warsaw one evening, where
Kasia's gramma is a sociology professor. We also stopped by the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, where we saw a phenomenal exhibition called
Polish Painting of the 21st Century. It was phenomenal. There is a great little scrolling gif of some of the paintings if you follow that link. I didn't get any pictures of the exhibit, but I did grab a shot of the main staircase, which had been doused in brightly colored paint from top to bottom.
I flew back to Budapest on the 22nd and feigned productivity through Christmas and the few days following (I still have so much work to do before class starts on Monday). But on the 29th, Kasia flew into Budapest to ring in the new year in Jokai Terrorist style. Kasia is one of the coolest people I have ever met. You may have noticed that I live with two of the coolest guys ever. Needless to say, the colliding of my two universes rendered a product that can only be called "swell."
It was a brilliant event, her three days here. I never noticed this, but she and Marko have the same taste in music. You would think I'd have caught onto this by now, not only because both of them enthusiastically wear their music collections on their sleeves (I mean, if there is one thing I know about Kasia, its her not so secret love of bands like The Killers and Neko Case, and Marko is like a walking John Cusack from Hi Fidelity, who knows more about American indy rock than I do). Also, Kasia made me a huge stack of CDs before I left Chicago, cause she's a rockstar like that, and Marko ONLY comments on my music when I play something she sent me. We ended up not making it to the shisha bar we wanted to go to on her last night in town, because the two of them spent nearly 2 hours transferring 5 gigs of music onto Kasia's computer from Marko's personal collection. Here is a picture of the two of them at New Years reciting the words to every Depeche Mode song ever written. Seriously.
The night before New Years, Stephen, Meaghan, Kasia and I walked down to the Elizabeth Bridge to go to the Rudas baths. Thats where we found all the crazy lights that are in the pics of the previous post. The baths on a Saturday night was just too full for us to handle the wait to get in, but we ended up walking around the city at night, which is always one of my favorite things to do.
On New Years Eve, we all went to the
Living Room. A whole crowd came. Stephen's girlfriend Meghan was in town, and Marko brought two friends from Croatia, Veno and Nada, who we first met when she came to visit over Halloween (check out those pics
here). I had plans to meet Asa at Oktogon, where a huge street party had been set up, but these plans got derailled, and he ended up calling me at 130am from someones apartment on Oktober 6, having been towed in by David Pupovic, with no idea where he was. The gods were indeed with us.
Later on, Marko and company stayed at the Living Room to get down with their bad selves, and Stephen, Meghan, Kasia and I trooped off with ideas of home. Instead, we started talking about cool places to visit before Kasia left, and in the end, at about 2am on New Years morning, we somehow made it to and into Szimpla (not the killer backdrop eh?).
We ran into some other CEU students, and Kasia immediately introduced herself as my facebook wife. This totally took the other students off guard, and they were like "ah, are you....really? Is that true?" Kasia responds in excellent form with "Well, I have no idea how long this is gonna last, since she is HAVING A PUBLIC AFFAIR!"
I still dont think they had fully figured out what was going on by the time we went home. I have never laughed so hard.
Her last night in town, Kasia and Marko and I stayed up till 5 am drinking wine in the park, watching Cunningham Muffins videos, and generally enjoying the heck out of each other's company while we could. She went back to Warsaw yesterday, and should be about in Chicago again by now. I miss Chicago, and the people in it. I want to have a slumber part with Sean and Ligaya so much I cant even tell you.
But its ok, because I apparently seem to have a nack for keeping a hold on rad people as life progresses.
Oh, and this just in. There is a good chance that I will get to don a tux as a groomsman in John Mayer's wedding. The happy penguin proposal will keep you abreast of new developments.
Onward to the papers. woot.
Labels: Budapest, clubs and bars, hotlinks, kasia, Marko, photos, rabble rousing, Stephen, thin justification for my existace, travel, Warsaw
Budapest Puts On Its New Year's Rags
OMG you guys!!1!1!!!1ONE!
Stephen just made his very own blog.
its pretty fabulous.
In fact, I might say that is, um, full of wonder.
Yes, wonder and merriment.
hungaryfor.blogspot.comOh, yea, and New Years made Budapest all purdy.
heh. neato.
Labels: Budapest, kasia, photos, thin justification for my existace
