nawl

I threw a mediterranean dinner party before I lost my appetite for the summer: homemade pitas, hummus, baba ghanoush, white bean puree, feta, roasted bell peppers, tabbouleh. People came and ate and gathered around the picnic table outdoors, all candlelight and fireflies and clinking glass and voices rising through the darkness about such erudite topics as... facebook.

I've heard more since about the homemade pitas than any other food I've ever made, no matter how difficult or tasty.

The Wild Oats on the corner of campus closed, victim to Whole Foods's purchase of the Wild Oats chain, because, as rumor has it, the location was competing with the Whole Foods on Route 1. Nevermind that any store gracing this location was by default the grocery store of choice for the entire population of carless Princetonians. I've ridden my bike the five miles to the Route 1 shopping centers once, and while it was fine, I don't really enjoy being the only bicycle in a SUV-filled parking lot the size of a town.

Anyways, Wild Oats closed and reopened as Olive May. The reopening was awaited with much trepidation by the entire aforementioned population of carless grad students, and so it was a bit trippy to walk the aisles and see: the same products, purged of the Wild Oats brand, in the exact same arrangement, the same cashiers, the same 10% student discount. There are emerging signs of real funkiness, though. The manager can be seen daily wearing enormous MC Hammer pants with a fish pattern, and the music now tends more to the apparent "employee CD collection" (with daily selections such as Elvis) than internationally standardized store muzak, and they now stock Soyrizo, and the fancy chocolate rack (a staple of my diet) is hidden in a new location every day. The produce still sucks.

Thunderstorms. There was one that everyone referred to for the next week or two as "that thunderstorm where the world was ending", because of the way the lightning flickered every second for hours. I watched it from the hammock in my glass-roofed porch. When the lightning stopped, we sat in the hot tub and ate ice cream and watched the fireflies glittering among the high trees.

There was the gay pride parade, but I was too sick to enjoy it.

I spent the fourth of July in the hot tub, an unexpectedly decadent evening that resulted in a six-person massage ring in the hot tub (carefully alternating boys and girls) in the torrential rain, until we decided that perhaps the hot tub was not the safest place to be in a thunderstorm.

Summertime means outdoor dancing in New York: Saturday afternoon tangoing in Central Park, where disconcertingly the large crowd of spectators claps after every song, Sunday evening tango at the South Street Seaport, which is all fresh breeze and romantically lit tall ships.

Shortly after the iPhone came out, I spent an afternoon in the 5th Avenue Apple store playing with one. The iPod software crashed every few minutes. I feel justified in my decision not to buy one.

The garden, unmaintained, has exploded, providing me green beans every time I think to go out and snack on one. The tomato hedges are now weighed down with swelling green globules, and the whole area smells intensely of tomato. The pepper plants produced one single pepper before being consumed by a bunny. My row of beautiful red lettuce was consumed by a bunny before I could do much more than snack on it, but the bunny seems to have rejected the romaine, which is largely growing up instead of out. The yellow squash and zucchini plants are inexplicably enormous, and have produced several surprise squashes. The watermelon that we planted before Clay decided to plant his zucchini over it has also produced vines which are racing to find sun before being blocked out by the zucchini. Watermelon planted elsewhere in the plot appears to have been a mixed bag: some of the vines are oddly shriveled, some seem to be just taking their time to come along. My experimental cucumber plants have produced one cucumber. The pumpkins dumped in the horrid front yard plots are incredibly happy, and have started to take over the wide asphalt expanse of the front driveway. I wish them luck.

I got a second hand ice cream machine off of Tigertrade, Princeton's private craigslist replacement, and have been turning out batches of chocolate sorbet. Recipe:

Chocolate Sorbet

Mix 1.5 cups cocoa powder with 1.5 cups sugar and 2 cups hot water. Dilute with 2 cups cold water, chill until nearly frozen, then run ice cream machine.

It's fabulously good.

I tried making traditional vanilla ice cream, with egg yolks and cream and all, but I got a migraine shortly after and have been loath to try that again.

Posted by nadia at 04:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Somehow moving off-campus has suddenly opened up a new Princeton to explore.

The satellite images on Google maps show a great treeless gash running through Princeton just north of my neighborhood.

It's the Transcontinental natural gas pipeline, and the treelessness runs uninterrupted all the way to Texas. A map of natural gas pipelines in the US shows them stretching from Texas and Louisiana to the northeast and midwest. Northern California is conspicuously empty.

Northeast of here are Herrontown Woods and Autumn Hill, to the southwest is Mountain Lakes. On recent lovely weekend afternoons, trails were largely deserted. A handful of footprints in the snow.

The weather is playing bait-and-switch with us.

One day it's 70 degrees,

the next a winter storm dumps the best snow of the season and keeps all the poor undergrads from going away for spring break.

The day after the snowfall, we went through four stores before finding one that was still selling winter gear, and bought sleds at the spring price of 50% off. An afternoon of rough-and-tumble sledding was enough to wear me out for the rest of the evening. I must be getting old.

I'm glad that spring is on its way. The first breath of warm air after a long cold spell is incredibly relaxing, as if some part of me has been unconsciously tense through winter. This is, oddly, not a sensation I feel when I merely fly on a plane from cold to warm. As I put it to a friend recently, I never really *understood* daffodils until I moved here.

That said, winter does have its moments of hilarity.

I moved offices, too, out of my lonely little abandoned office on my lonely little abandoned floor to a corner office with *two* windows where I don't have to go so far to see people. I may still spend days trying to prove things that are not true, but at least I'll be happier about doing so.

Posted by nadia at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have moved off campus, into a lovely little house north of the university.

It was sort of a last-minute fluke. The subject of where we wanted to live next year came up in conversation after brunch, and a quick perusal of tiger trade and craigslist later, we found ourselves touring the one house in the area currently for rent that fit our price range, size, and location constraints.

(A six-bedroom mansion with a pool, hot tub, and tennis courts was tempting, but in order to make the rent we'd probably have to house the entire graduate school, so that was, sadly, out.)

It was perfect, so after a little scramble for housemates, we moved. It's sunny. It's a block from a grocery store and a mile from campus. It has a nice kitchen. It has a big backyard with a barn and a bridge over a little frozen pond.

I imagine a previous owner of the house a plant fanatic, compulsively remodeling the place to add the multiple glassed-in porches, big windows, extended rooms cut out of the original walls, doors everywhere.

Of course, moving wasn't without its adventures. The day we decided to move in also happened to be the day the power company decided to shut off the power, and it took them two days to turn it back on again.

One outlet in the entire place worked. (Wired, we presume, to the separate apartment upstairs.) So we chained extension cords and power strips across the house, lit candles, managed not to blow any fuses. The stove, fortunately, is gas, and so I cooked myself a lovely birthday dinner that we ate over candlelight in our new dining room, bundled up against the cold as the inside temperature crept through uncomfortable towards freezing. I was glad that night to have a real down blanket.

Since then I've been on a sort of cooking rampage, burning through the pent-up urges that built up over a year and a half of dorm food.

I present a partial list of things that have been cooked since moving in last week, along with superfluous macro shots of selected dishes:

blue cheese, apple, and pecan salad
lentil soup
chocolate mousse
home made boursin
cheese fondue
chocolate fondue
hot cheddar spread

baked goat cheese salad

cream of broccoli and cauliflower soup

chocolate cake "Le Marquis" from Julia Child

avocado maki
chocolate cake "Devil's Food Cockaigne" from the Joy of Cooking
cheese enchiladas
beans
green salad

It's been a long time since I lived somewhere with a dishwasher. It's become an almost unimaginable luxury, the ideal of 20th century pushbutton housekeeping. I put dishes into a machine, push a button, and they come out sparkly and pristine. I put my clothes into a machine, push a button, and they emerge warm and fluffy.

(Another hope I had with moving is that the dorm food was contributing to the migraines. We'll see about that one.)

Posted by nadia at 01:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Life has been busy.

There are school things.

I'm TAing this semester, the introductory programming course, which is called rather unspecifically "General Computer Science". I'm responsible for a "precept" (discussion section) of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed undergrads who are being taken on a super-fast-paced tour through everything in CS. In Java. Standing in front of a class is not nearly as difficult as I had thought it might be. My students are all really nice and smart and hard-working, and they ask lots of really good questions during class, and the light-speed pace of the class means that none of the material really sinks in enough for them to start asking hard questions.

Teaching is taking up almost all of my time.

I'm taking one course, algebraic methods in combinatorics. The mathematicians are startled that so many computer scientists have infiltrated their tower. The book, "Linear Algebra Methods in Combinatorics" is just one check for $30.15 to the University of Chicago away from your doorstep and is really beautiful.

I'm also taking introductory Russian, on the solemn promise to myself that I wouldn't work too hard in it. (Princeton offers neither Hungarian nor Norwegian, and Spanish was full.) I now know how to write my name in Cyrillic (Надя). Learning to write cursive Cyrillic is kind of a mind-bending experience: 't' is written 'm', 'd' is written 'g', that backwards N is written 'u' and pronounced 'i', that sort of thing. I'm recognizing a lot of words that must have been borrowed into Hungarian from Russian. In fact, it's extremely difficult to overcome the urge to speak Hungarian all the time while in Russian class.

But in actuality, I'm doing super-important research. Yeah.

I've started to get regular migraines. This is not pleasant. I've also been sleeping 10, 12, 16 hours a day, which oddly enough becomes as commendable to fellow grad students as sleep deprivation used to be. "Way to just... check out."

Last weekend I cut off about a foot of hair, taking it back to tailbone length. I did this by taking a pair of scissors to a party.

I have my own room in the old graduate college, and for the first time in a year and a half, some actual items of furniture that I own myself. Theoretically, my room could sleep up to six people on soft surfaces, so you should all come visit me.

This is Princeton. I live in a castle. My room overlooks the main courtyard and tower.

It's really quite pleasant when the construction isn't going on both sides of my room.

I eat breakfast and dinner every day in Proctor hall, which is really too magnificent for the food that is served in it. Last Thursday our dinner clique dressed up in our nicest clothes for dinner, thoroughly confusing many grad students who had difficulty understanding "just because".

I've been dancing a lot: the international social at Ballroom on Fifth, tango in Central Park, Millennium Hustle, tango in Philadelphia, ballroom lessons on Monday, tango lessons on Thursday. I own more pairs of dancing shoes than I do street shoes.

The weather is slipping gently into fall. It was late summer when I arrived, humid, warm, crickets and cicadas and birds and squirrels blending into a constant hum day and night, one particularly spectacular thunderstorm that took out the power for a good portion of the evening. The near-freezing temperatures that came along with the snowstorm that took out upstate New York last week appear to have quieted the last of the crickets.

The leaves have begun to turn.

When it's sunny it's like a blessing, these absolutely sparkling fall days that are not humid, not warm, not cold, just perfect. We went for a ride along the tow path on one of these.

Posted by nadia at 03:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Late spring flowers.

West of campus and the IAS woods.

New Jersey is very flat from Fine Hall.

An Apple store opening in Manhattan. There was a big crowd waiting to go in, and a second crowd gathered around the first, snapping pictures on their cell phones and commenting on the lines. "I talked to one woman who'd been waiting for six hours!" "There was a guy in line on his Segway who was taking pictures of people as he rode by!"

I flew to Seattle.

Within hours of landing, I was feasting on sushi, and cupcakes bought from a newly-opened cupcake cafe that replaced the Ben and Jerry's that closed because the neighborhood shut it out for being non-local and competing with the 85-year-old neighborhood ice cream shop, and ice cream bought from said ice cream shop (chocolate orange!) and lounging in a hot tub watching the sun set over jagged mountains.

I'm charmed by this city. It's on the correct coast. The trees are familiar. There are cozy little ranch houses with little flower gardens. The downtown area may be a bit shiny and sterile for my taste, but there are funky little neighborhoods up and down hills, and mountains in the distance, and water everywhere.

I realized there was something odd going on while riding the bus, and then I figured it out. There are no black people here.

Oh, and the conference. There are interesting talks, and lots of interesting people. But really, it is a night at the opera, or a society ball. We are here to see, and be seen, and work, and we new students are like debutantes at our coming out. Where do you come from? And who do you work with? What are you presenting? Who is your advisor? How's the dog?

It's fun. I have lots to read.

My favorite quote of the conference so far, from Impagliazzo, in response to some question I couldn't hear: "If it could be done by 19th century techniques, Gauss would have done it. Gauss is 19th century complete."

I fixed my blog the other day, but in the process lost nearly all of my comments to a corrupted database. This has the interesting effect that anybody commenting on an entry causes all the comments to disappear. Goodbye girly-girl comments, goodbye angry Christians.

Posted by nadia at 01:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Conference, this week, at DIMACS. Take all of the mathematicians mentioned in, say, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers and throw them in a lecture hall with a handful of grad students. Well, only the living ones. Erdos might as well have been there, though, for all that he was incarnated.

Laszlo Lovasz on convergent sequences of graphs, for the second time. Throwing away all the details, imagine that you define some notion of distance between two graphs. Then you can have a Cauchy sequence of graphs. If the number of vertices goes to infinity, what does the graph converge to? Why, a function defined on the unit square. Isn't that neat? Now look at the problem from the other direction, and imagine that you are creating a random graph as follows: the connection matrix is a sort of discretization of a function defined on the unit square, where an edge between x and y is created with probability f(x,y). Of course this makes sense. Paper here though I haven't read it.

A very small and beautiful talk by Rados Radoicic on rainbow arithmetic progressions, where a rainbow arithmetic progression means each term in the progression is colored with a different color. A counterexample, this, I think, recursively generated by writing 1 2 * 1 2 *... and replacing each * with a term of that same sequence.

DIMACS is housed at Rutgers, which meant that I was waking up at 7 am to catch a train and then a bus to where I needed to be on the campus. Rutgers, of course, is the ultimate big state school, a university of something like 40,000 students sprawled out across a huge swath of New Brunswick. According to the class schedule, there are 20 minute breaks between classes to allow students to get from one part of the university to another on buses.

And staring out the window of the campus bus, I was somehow reminded of an eastern bloc country. It was something about the ill-advised 60s architecture, the blocky brick highrises, the wide streets along flat green countryside, the inexplicable 6-lane freeway separating one part of campus from another, the huge stadium complexes. But at the same time it's very American, the girls are broad-shouldered and dyed-blonde in flip-flops, each one outfitted with iPod nano and cell phone, chatting cheerily with friends about last night's drunken exploits.

Peter Shor came to speak at Princeton last night, and to have lunch with grad students today. (For those keeping score at home, he was the one who came up with an algorithm for factoring in polynomial time on a quantum computer.) I know nothing about quantum computation. I realized only last night when it was pointed out that the problems that are known to have faster quantum algorithms are those (like factoring) that are generally believed not to be NP-complete. Why is this exciting? Well, the idea that computational power is a physical property of our universe. Could you ask a string theorist to come up with a computational model? "Probably, though nobody understands string theory and the ones who do are too busy trying to understand the nature of the universe." I had to defend my discipline: "But we compute things precisely to understand the nature of the universe."

Well, apparently quantum information theory is going somewhere.

For amusement there's this. If only everything could be so amusing. And while I'm at it, I have to express appreciation for this poem, which I must confess I've had a fondness for ever since it (or something similar) was projected on the wall of a certain Berkeley apartment so many years ago.

I have been doing other happy things too, in all the time that I'm not spending sleeping. Buying plane tickets, planning things. Very complicated. In a few days I will perhaps post a schedule.

(The flowers, by the way, are all within a few minutes' walk of the grad college.)

Posted by nadia at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by nadia at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Home now. Happy Thanksgiving.

I've been feeling homesick lately.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to keep from screaming out "The east coast is a soulless pit full of pale people who dress in tasteful collared shirts and short skirts and pointy-toed high heels all carefully matched in seasonally-appropriate color schemes and live in boxy houses and who relax by sitting in bars and getting drunk and only work hard in search of some kind of external validation and eat beautiful food that tastes uniformly like cardboard and nobody touches anyone unless it's sexual," where by "east coast" I actually mean the ivy-league Princeton microcosm that I spend most of my time in.

I mean, I know that isn't entirely fair. East coast people who get stuck in California complain about the lack of seasons and black-and-white cookies.

But really, instead of mountains and sea, there are strip malls and wimpy trees. What am I supposed to do?

The weather is dipping towards winter. Last week the temperature dropped 30 degrees within a couple hours, and when I woke up yesterday morning the sidewalk was dotted with frozen plates of ice covering the puddles from the rain the day before.

When I took my bike out, the gear shift and brakes were stuck until I pulled on the cables and little chunks of ice fell out.

With other students from the bay area, we reminisce about cheap food that doesn't suck, about living in Berkeley co-ops, about Gaskell ball. With students who aren't, I end up trying to explain what exactly it is about long-haired bi Pagan poly geeks that I miss, and tell probably inappropriate stories about food orgy and naked hot tubbing that are sure to brand me as a hairy hippy for years to come.

Am I so fundamentally a west-coast person that I'll never be happy anywhere else?

(Update: Mike, native east-coaster and former Princetonite, responds to my holier-than-thou grousing.)

Posted by nadia at 09:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sunday was absolutely stunning, warm, clear, sunny.

I was almost ready to forgive the horrid weather of the past few weeks, when I realized that it felt exactly like Christmas in California.

In any case, we went for a ride along the tow path. Lots of pretty leaves, lots of people out enjoying the nice weather and some sort of crew race that was happening on the lake.

It was less populated a few highways away from Princeton.

Does that last picture look funny to you? It's upside down.

Posted by nadia at 08:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

News flash: when all four classes have assignments due in the same week, I don't have time for much else.

Apologies, dear neglected blog.

There is a golf course separating the grad college from the rest of the campus. Every day I walk past rows of golf carts neatly parked in a row, and evil thoughts enter my mind. Have *you* played GTA: Vice City?

These are the leaves on my way through campus:

I bought a bicycle. It is beautiful and shiny and quiet. Every day I lock it next to the rusted-out hulls of older bicycles and know that soon enough it will join their rusty ranks. Some people park their bicycles under the archways, just locked to themselves or to nothing at all. This scares the heck out of me. As does leaving my (ground floor, unbarred) windows open during the day. Perhaps I spent too long in Berkeley.

A single branch of yellow leaves in the rain:

I like having an office to work in. When I go there I can enforce a rule of no distractions besides email. The sound of the little Unix-beep brings such warmth to my heart.

The trees outside of the CS building all turned yellow one day. Then the rain knocked off all their leaves:

It's a small, small world. One night over dinner, I was discussing the difference between American and international style ballroom, and got up to demonstrate a foxtrot feather-step. Later a guy came up to me and asked if I danced. We chatted, first-year, CS department, blah blah, and he said "Oh, you're the one who was in Hungary." I asked how he knew, and he said he was from Budapest and a dancer acquaintance told him about a friend who was starting at Princeton. When I asked who it was, he said "Glasses, brown hair to about here" and motioned to his chin. I can count the number of you who will get this on one hand.

The engineering library has big glass windows:

I ran out of anecdotes, so here are some big glass library windows at night:

I saw a political analyst talk about why political revolutions need to have impetus from the population, or in other words, why this Iraq thing is going to fail. It was in the Woodrow Wilson School, or "Woody Woo". The lecture hall was lined with wood cut from logs and arranged so they formed symmetric patterns on the wall.

This is the school at night, on my way home from the department:

They paid me. I looked at the amount on the check. It seemed like such an enormous quantity of money, so I amused myself by calculating how much disposable income that gave me per day. I spend that much per week, maybe, and that's because I'm being extravagant. Maybe I'll travel around the world.

Ghost clothes in the fogged-out windows of J.Crew. Perhaps it's time to turn down the air conditioning.

Posted by nadia at 05:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)