hmmmmm...grrg

manchmal würde ich skrupellos töten für eine scheibe roggenbrot mit gouda. oder quark...
ganz zu schweigen von club mate
noch 3 monate, dann gibt es wieder echtes essen!

glück im unglück und merkwürdige naturphänomene

yesterday it rained for the first time since i've been here. coming from germany, this shouldn't strike me as an exceptional phenomenon, but here it's really a little freaky. suddenly there's water, falling down from the sky! we used an umbrella! (even more surprising was the fact that lindsay actually had an umbrella in his car)
i had been very excited for the last couple of days, because i was supposed to get my car on friday. but, pustekuchen, aber: glück im umglück. the girl who owned the car went on a trip to san francisco last week and wanted to sell me the car after she returned. she even had the car checked before her trip to make sure it would last that long. well, it didn't. it broke down somewhere on the way, and it turned out that the repair would have cost more than the car was worth, so she sold the car for a bad price to some guy in san francisco and came back in a rental car. sounds like a not-so-fun trip. so now i have to find a car somewhere else, but i'm sort of scared to do that, because i feel like there are about a million ways in which that can go wrong and about 5 or 6 that will turn out ok. like playing lotto. i'm just the perfect person to be fooled by some nasty car dealer, he wouldn't even have to be all that clever...

my first...

yoga lesson ever happened today. lindsay (who is - by the way - not a girl, such as e.g. hilary p. is not a girl), one of my favourite fellow graduate students, started going there on monday, so i grabbed the opportunity to have someone to go with and thus registered for the "usc workout" today. overall, the sports facilities at usc are frightening places. dozens of identical looking very tanned very blonde girls on cross-trainers and weight-lifting 20-year old guys in muscle shirts. anyway, yoga was great, much less "spiritual" and esoteric than i expected. and the positions seemed very much as if they had been especially created to hit all the muscles on my secret "weak-spots-list". my arms are going to hurt badly tomorrow... anyway, i'll go again on friday, and i'll also try to get lewis, another one of my favourite grad students (who is not a girl either, just for clarification) to join in, so that there'll be a crowd of philosophers that is big enough to counterbalance the blonde barbies.

my department

so far i haven't really done justice to the fact that my blog is named "julia's cave", the kitchen and other stuff part has been pretty dominant. i promise that as soon as i get back into serious working mood and start cooking up arguments, there will be philosophy posts on this blog. for now, i'll start with some photos of my department, which is awesome in a variety of respects. one of these respects is that it's just pretty.

kate in l.a.

there are many songs about california and los angeles, but at the moment this is my favourite:
http://www.katemicucci.com/music/kate-micucci
_walking-in-los-angeles.mp3

my first...

car. as it turns out, i'll soon be the proud owner of a car, for the first time in my life. the precious entity that will soon be mine is a white 20-year-old toyota. of course, white desperately begs for being painted on, so i'm open for suggestions concerning a complete-car-makeover. i was thinking of pink flames, but that's just a first idea. let me know what you think.

i am ... the berlin wall

as probably most of my friends know, i started dancing tango argentino a while ago and have become somewhat addicted to it since then. thus, having arrived in l.a., one of the first things i checked out were the milongas in town. innocent and naive as i am, i started dancing with different guys, more precisely with two guys in particular. one of them is an american b-movie film producer (responsible for masterpieces like 'leprechaun' and 'doppelganger'), who is easily recognizable by his cowboy hat. the other one is a professional tango dancer who is originally from russia and exhibits all features one usually associates whith russian machismo. silly little julia thought dancing with those two guys would be entirely compatible and not cause any problems, but how wrong she was... seems like the cold war (including ridiculous propaganda) is not over yet, and little julia is stuck in the middle just like the berlin wall. however, contrary to what may come to mind first, the solution to this problem is not to rely on david don't-hassel-the-hoff to make the berlin wall go down...

die gute fee

dear doro dug out a picture of me at her alter ego party that i decided to share with you...