anxiety dream

last night, i was in seattle, on my way to an interview. i don’t live in seattle now, but did for & after college. this person wanted to meet me somewhere downtown, by westlake center, but not a place i really knew. it was supposed to be a coffeeshop/cupcake place. but i arrived on the transit line (some sort of light rail that doesn’t exist) and realized at the mall that i was completely unprepared. i was already late.  i had no idea at what address we were meeting. i didn’t have her phone number with me. i considered calling my mother to have her look in my email. but while i was sitting, i heard my interviewee(!) going down an escalator to the subway, on the phone leaving a message for me! i stopped her, we found the place, she’d brought a friend which was weird, i offered to pay and she got $30 worth of food. i didn’t have my interview schedule written yet – in fact i hadn’t even really thought through what i wanted to ask. i didn’t have a consent form with me.

she was pretty cool, though. it turns out i was doing a project interviewing 3 groups of people who in some way have a disjoint in their lives. one group (the one she was a part of) was lesbians who date fags.

perhaps i should stop procrastinating.

i’m having a party!

i get to make sour mix in bulk.

and wear these shoes.

green chile turkey enchiladas

last night i managed to make quite passable enchiladas, from the hatch green chilis in my freezer, and the turkey stock & meat from thanksgiving. i wouldn’t have blanched at these from a restaurant! these are northern new mexico style: flat (not rolled) and with blue corn tortillas. if only i could master sopaipillas …

surprisingly easy recipe:

Green Chile Sour Cream Enchiladas – 3 servings

from PNM’s Cocinas de New Mexico

3 c chicken broth

3 T Flour

1 c chopped cooked chicken

1 c frozen green chile, thawed, drained

1/2 t garlic salt

Shortening

9 corn tortillas

2 c shredded sharp Cheddar cheese

1 onion, chopped

2 c sour cream

Whisk 1 c of the broth with the flour in a saucepan until smooth.  Whisk in remaining 2 c broth.  Cook over medium heat until thickened, stirring constantly.  Stir in the chicken, green chile and garlic salt.  Remove from heat.  Heat enough shortening in a heavy pan to measure 1/2 ” deep.  Soften each tortilla in the shortening.  Drain on paper towels.  Mix 1 c of the cheese, onion and sour cream in a bowl.  Layer 1/4 c of the chicken mixture, 1 tortilla, 1/4 c of the chicken mixture and 1/3 c of the sour cream mixture 3 times on an ovenproof-dinner plate.  Repeat with the remaining ingredients.  Top with any remaining chicken mixture.  Sprinkle with remaining cheese.  Bake at 350 for 15 min or until the cheese melts.

higher ed unaffordable

the nyt reports on a report about the increasing cost of higher ed – increasing about 3 times faster than median family income – and projects that higher ed will be unaffordable in about 25 years. it’s “affordable” now, since

Last year, the net cost at a four-year public university amounted to 28 percent of the median family income, while a four-year private university cost 76 percent of the median family income.

of course, richer families disproportionately send their children to private schools, so the cost for them is relatively lower. as shown in their nice little graphic:

i’m reminded of the fantastically fun adam gopnik/malcolm gladwell new yorker debate on abolishing the institution of the ivy league where gladwell laid out his position: “i’m not arguing that the institution of the ivy league should be abolished, but that the institutions of the ivy league be abolished, their assets divided, and their dorms turned into luxury condos, to the extent that they are not already luxury condos.”

nothing to do with class and race, why do you ask?

i’m driven out of complacency by this incredible new york times magazine article about surrogacy. i’m not particularly fond of the whole idea to begin with, but i thought, hey, maybe the times will have something interesting to say. hmpf.

let’s just start with the photograph at the top. do i really need to deconstruct an image of a white woman in a pink top and skirt holding a baby with a brown woman in a nurse’s uniform standing at attention in front of a columned porch? i mean, it’s so blatant it could be satire.

come to think of it, the whole piece – if it didn’t smack so much of complete self-indulgence – could be satire. of course it’s all about the computer why she just happens to feel so comfortable with cathy, her gestational surrogate:

And her computer-generated essay indicated, among other things, a certain level of competence. This gleaned morsel of information made me glad: she must live in a house with a computer and know how to use it. In our conference call with Cathy and her husband, Mick — the vice president of marketing for a credit union — we felt immediately comfortable.

unlike, you know, all those poor incompetent women who don’t own computers and aren’t married to credit union executives.

and let’s count up the costs: 12 ivf treatments at $8000/pop plus $4000 in medication = $144,000. then $25K for the surrogate. and i assume all her travel and medical expenses, so let’s just round up and say they spent $200,000 getting an infant that shared their genes. i hope it was worth it.

to think i was sick to my stomach about obama’s “unprecedented” capping of donations at $50,000 per person. i’m all about ritual (i am a sociologist after all) but really.

UPDATE: she’s on the brian lehrer show right now, and boy is she making my blood boil. it turns out that that photo is totally not representative of how she lives her life, just because she happens to live in Southampton and her baby nurse which lots of people have happens to come from Trinidad. And also, she couldn’t adopt because she was too old and because private adoptions actually would have cost more, and those are what people do when they want to have a baby that, you know, looks something like them. silly me. oh, and, she totally doesn’t understand why people are upset about the class issue, because actually cathy is like the same class as she is even though she needs to clean up her porch, which is why it totally wasn’t awkward to pay cathy $25,000 to bear her child – it’s not like she was poor.

was the npr news today …

REALLY about whether kim jong il can brush his teeth?

back, sort of

back in the country, but having trouble transitioning into work. which is a problem seeing as i am trying to write 2 grants before next month.

but anyway, i’m doing some relatively productive procrastination involving catching up on my lightweight reading, and so though i’m a bit late to the game, i want to say that i’m really excited about wick sloane’s “embedded in a community college” series. i’ve only read the first article so far, which as he says captures more his rage than any kind of coherent narrative, but the gist is that we seriously underfund cc’s and that the students who are in them are struggling, both academically and economically, and that your heart breaks every day you teach there. it captures why i care about whether students go to 4 or 2 year colleges, and why i think it’s important to figure out the pathways students take into one or the other. and it makes me really mad.

that’s all.

on vacation!

pictures will be up periodically here http://auderey.blogspot.com/. at some point when i’m back i’ll probably write more about them here too.

blog help

does anyone know whether multiple blogs i make under my username are connected to each other in any public way? like “other blogs by this author”? if, eg, i wanted to start one blog for personal things and one for professional and be pseudonymous on one but not on the other?

i <3 grading.

as long as i take frequent breaks to play set (here in better format, but here where you can track your time) or look at peoples’ secrets.

one gem, from a course reflection:

[The APA format] is new to me, and I have come to dislike it very much. The easiest thing about the research class is the watching the movie part, the Great Debaters, it is so relaxing and makes the class way more interesting.

i try, dude, i try. fwiw, i hate APA, but am forced to teach it in the class. i found the movie so-so.