betsey brada

Mount Holyoke College (BA, Critical Social Thought) 1993 - 1997; University of Chicago (Ph.D., Anthropology) 2002 - ??

spending your hard-earned tax dollars

no affiliations; only agnates and matrilateral cross-cousins

Reading, knitting, getting lost in southern Africa, laughing, making other people laugh. Also poetry, history, social theory, choral music, and floating around on wikipedia late at night.

Anything by Graham Swift, W.H. Auden's Collected Poems, Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, <i>Mating</i> by Norman Rush, <i>Jane Eyre</i> by Charlotte Bronte. After sniffing around his works for a few years now, I am thoroughly enjoying Sebastian Faulk's <i>Human Traces</i>, and I remain convinced that Jeanette Winterson can write circles around most other contemporary prose authors.

Bleu, In America, Farewell My Concubine, Run Lola Run, the Piano, Say Anything, The Long Kiss Goodnight, anything by Miyazaki, anything with Juliette Binoche, almost anything with Johnny Depp. I really liked Casino Royale...

I will listen to damn near anything if you stick me in a room with it. Currently in rotation: Gnarles Barkley, Franco & OK Jazz, Peter Gabriel, Amadou & Mariam, Dave Matthews, Kate Bush, Gorecki, Nada Surf, Sigur Ros. I've come to the conclusion that I get excellent work done to Madonna.

Colbert Report, Daily Show, X-Files (before it got lame). These days: Firefly, Buffy (season 6)

I am the girl who hangs out on the edge of the party, looking around until she gets her bearings. Given the opportunity, I prefer to discuss you and the world around us, but if you leave me no choice, then I start the comedy routine that is the story of my life as I tell it. If there is a beat, I will be moving to it. It probably feels like I'm flirting with you, but that's just the way I learned to look sympathetic; take it personally at your risk. That said, I like people who take risks. I enjoy standing at the edge of cliffs, but I've long gotten over any romance with the idea of casting myself off them. I'm the worst of amateur polyglots: jack of all languages and master of none. With singing it's a different matter entirely: if languages could be learned entirely through song, I'd be a professional polyglot instead. I've decided that my third decade of life is the decade in which I come to love my hair. I grew up in a desert, and have somehow found myself in a desert again; if nothing else, it makes me remember how it feels to appreciate water and greenery as exotica. I'm a pragmatic optimist, except when I'm frustrated or very, very tired. I don't like to show when I'm intimidated; I almost always show when I'm amused, which is often. I'm not an overt rule-breaker, but if I haven't had a chance to raise hell in a while, then look out and lock up your daughters...

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills -
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.

-- Czeslaw Milosz

Someone else who doubts that there's a point but who sees the moral value in acting as though there were one.