bruxelles, noel (add two dots on the last 'e')

since yesterday i have been in brussels now, for family christmas. so far i'm the only guest at my aunt's and uncle's house, though, my mother, her new boyfriend (will we like him? even be nice to him? we'll see...), and my grandparents will arrive tomorrow. things are good, i like seeing my family, and for the extra christmassy feeling brussels looks like it has been dusted with confectioner's sugar. hmmm, i'm sooo lazy. i think i'll just stop writing here, and lie on the couch...

berlin, berlin

i finally arrived in berlin on sunday, after my flight had been delayed for two days due to the weather conditions on the east coast. waiting for two days wasn't too bad, since that gave me time to finish up my final papers and spend tow more days with brian. berlin is the way it always is in the winter, even though i had forgotten how grey and cold it is. maybe the sudden transition from california to here makes the difference more striking. i wonder if i am going to see the sun at all while i'm here...

more good news

here are more good news of this week:
1. i am moving after winter break. at this point, i have probably complained to everybody about how passionately i hate my student housing apartment. it's dark, it's ugly, it doesn't have a kitchen, and it doesn't even have a proper big bed. and even though it's near campus, the neighborhood absolutely sucks.
but, fortunately it turned out that my very nice co-student geoff needs a new roommate in pasadena, and that new roommate will be me!
2. i just learned that i was able to get out of the basic logic course requirement of my grad program, because i've done enough logic in berlin (anyone who seriously doubts that, please step forward).
which means i can take way more exciting courses next semester. high five! and special thanks to uwe for writing the crucial letter!

Juhu!

Hurra! I passed my behind-the-wheel driving exam this morning. Which means that I am now the proud owner of a california driver's license.

things i will invent and make a lot of money with

1. cat food that smells good

always wanted to talk to your dead loved ones?

i should have thought of this, what a brilliant idea: you tell a dead sick person your message and they deliver it after they've passed away.
http://www.afterlifetelegrams.com/AFTERLIFE/
it's just five dollars a word. so "hey grandma, hope you're well, you've always been my favorite" is only 50 bucks. however, more elaborate messages are a little more expensive: for example "hey x, i'm sorry you died in that car accident, but i just wanted to let you know that i'm over you. i would have broken up with you pretty soon anyway, since you really sucked in bed" is 190 bucks, so you should really think about whether it's that important that your ex knows that.

i never thought i needed one, but how wrong i was

i found something absolutely magnificent, yes, mind-blowing on the internet today. if you're a woman, you know how hard it can be to find the matching purse that goes with your favorite outfit. but now, that's all in the past. a purse that is shaped like a vagina obviously goes with everything...
http://www.artgoddess.com/purses.htm

food, japanese, korean

i had some interesting food experiences lately that i want to share with you, few but dear readers of my blog.
first: japanese
my old friend joe is in town at the moment, which is very exciting, since i only see him about once a year. for those of you who don't know the story: i used to work in a souvenir shop in berlin and joe, who works as a drumtech for the band tool, was one of my customers, in fact he bought postcard and then came back later because "he had forgotten to buy stamps". anyway, he took me out to a very fancy japanese restaurant in hollywood (on sunset/la cienega), which was indeed so fancy that the valet parking of the restaurant alone cost me $18. but dinner was on joe, and he did his best to please my palate. the restaurant does sushi, but their specialty is little skewers with all kinds of stuff cooked on a charcoal grill. amazing. and i had the best eggplant in my entire life, cooked to perfection with some sweetish japanese sauce on it (the stuff that you also sometimes get on unagi). so that was definitely good.
now: korean
strangely enough, although i'm dating a native southern californian guy, my sweet brian, i get lot's of korean associations when i think of him. on the day when he first kissed me, we had been to a great korean bar in koreatown (where smoking is permitted!!! or at least everybdy does it). the bar is actually so korean that they don't have an english menu, so without brian i wouldn't even have been able to order. (brian lived in korea for a year and therefore speaks some korean). and yesterday, he cooked me a surprise korean dinner, which was very good but also very spicy. it was pancakes with red peppers and scallions, a soy-sauce-sesame-dip, cucumber salad, radish and eggplant. very impressive, expecially since my asian cooking skills don't reach further than the indian subcontinent. we conclude: at least in terms of cooking skills we're a good match!

will it blend?

having got my paycheck for november, i bought myself something very magnificent: a black&decker blender. i have wanted to own a blender for the last 1.5 years, but knowing that i would leave germany it would have been stupid. and now my little household dream has finally come true. now i can make soups, frozen margaritas, and other creamy things. if you don't get how exciting blenders can be, go to youtube and type in "will it blend". it turns out, if you have a good blender (better than mine), you can actually blend an iphone.
another quite wonderful thing: i found out at yoga today that i am able to do feathered peacock pose (a forearmstand). which means you clasp your hands, put your forearms on the ground, clasped hands close to the wall, and then you kick up and just stand on the forearms, head off the ground. looks very cool, and much more difficult than it actually is.
i also passed my written driving exam, by the way. and it turns out, you probably can't get a job at the dmv unless you're a black woman and at least 40 pounds overweight...

learning something new everyday is wonderful...

...though sometimes not for free. today i learned how much it costs to forget that you parked your car on the wednesday-street-cleaning side of the street on a wednesday. just $50 for a valuable lesson.
tomorrow I am going to take the written test in order to get the california driver's license. i have already read very interesting things in the dmv booklet. Who would have guessed that in california, you must not park your car in an intersection. now that i know, i'll stop doing that, really.
i also have a real american phone now, finally. my number: 001-213 909 4178
call me (unless you don't know me).

hell

are you one of those people who sometimes wonders what it would be like in hell? i think over the course of the week, i found out. hell is los angeles traffic at rush hour and everybody drives the way i do.
it's a miracle that i and my car (and other people) are still alive, given crazy traffic. and on top of that, i have to get a california driver's license. i hate driving tests. and if i drive the way i did on thursday on the 110 freeway, no sane person should ever give me a license...

week of special accomplishments

the last week was very exciting, which is why i feel somewhat exhausted now, even though there is still one day left. the first really exciting thing that happened was that i got invited to give a talk in frankfurt, at the linguistics department. i had given a talk on predicates of personal taste at a graduate conference in berlin last summer, and obviously one of the professors from frankfurt liked my talk enough to want to hear it again. my first real talk, with a hotel and a dinner and all that stuff. that's so exciting!!! so if you happen to be in frankfurt on january 10, 2008, come by!
the second really exciting this was that i finally got my car yesterday. i already drove it on the freeway and through the mountains today, and it's great, although i'm still a bit scared of l.a. traffic. the freeway has exits on the left and on the right, that's just crazy. but for today, i'm still alive and the car is, too.
third exciting thing: obviously i can do a handstand and also elephant pose, which i found out during yoga this week. very unexpected.
and, last but not least: i can't complain about lack of excitement concerning my love-and-emotional-live, though that's more luck than an accomplishment. hmmm...

CAR!!!

i know i've been a very lazy blogger in the last couple of weeks, but that's mainly because the things that happened were either boring or don't belong on this blog.
however, there's definitely one exciting thing i need to share: i finally found a car that i'm going to buy! and it's a cool car, a mazda miata convertible. hopefully, i'll have it by next week, i already test-drove it on friday and it feels awesome. plus, it's a manual transmission, which is not very common in the us, which makes me extra-happy!

suggestions for birthday presents

i've been 25 for about half an hour now (add 9 hours if you're in germany). if anybody wants to give me a birthday present and doesn't have any idea yet, i'd like some brain, please, any amount is fine. my apartment is largely dominated - apart from the ugly furniture - by large stacks of papers that i need to read and understand, but my brain capacity doesn't seem to be sufficient for that. i read too slowly, think too slowly, write too slowly. so extra brain would be nice. maybe some external brain that i can plug into my nose whenever i need to. well, back to michael dummett now.

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...

kartoffel-fenchelcremesuppe mit oliventopping

diese rezept hat leider keine aufregende geschichte, es stammt aus einem schnoeden italienischen kochbuch:
fuer die suppe:
eine gewuerfelte zwiebel und zwei knoblauchzehen anbraten, zwei geschaelte gewuerfelte kartoffeln dazu und eine kleingeschnittene knolle fenchel (das gruene obendran fuer spaeter aufheben). mit wasser aufgiessen (ein liter oder so) und kochen, bis das gemuese weich ist, dann puerieren und mit salz, pfeffer und zitronensaft abschmecken.

fuer obendrauf:
eine knoblauchzehe sehr fein hacken, einen halben bund glatte petersilie fein hacken, das fenchelgruen hacken, die schale von einer unbehandelten zitrone abreiben, eine handvoll schwarze oliven kleinschneiden, alles zusammenmischen, ein bisschen olivenoel dazu und dann einen grossen loeffel davon auf jeden teller suppe drauf. fertig. keine tricks.

i'm the president of pegasus!

today we had a meeting of the graduate student group in the philosophy department, called pegasus (how lame...), and i became the president! which means that now i'm in charge of organizing the usc/ucla graduate student conference in the next semester, i'm curious how that's going to work out. people present at the meeting immediately suggested that my title shouldn't be "president" but "die fuehrerin", but somehow we didn't get a majority on that. since i've never been president of anything before, i thought this might be worth posting...and of course in order to inform people that they can now feel free to call me "mrs. president".

kronos quartet

yesterday night i finally went to the kronos quartet concert at the california plaza in downtown l.a., which i had been very much looking forward to. they performed together with a pipa player, which i had mistakenly thought of as some sort of flute, but it turned out it's actually a string instrument. this was the program of the evening:

"Welcome the Kronos Quartet back to Grand Performances as they bring a diverse, eclectic concert to the Festival with special guest pipa virtuoso Wu-Man. This evening’s special presentation is offered in conjunction with Performance West – a festival of arts events presented as part of the Western Arts Alliance’s annual conference in Los Angeles. PROGRAM: 1. Oh Mother, The Handsome Man Tortures Me (Iraq) (Arranged by Kronos, transcribed by Ljova) 2. Flugufrelsarinn - The Fly Freer (Sigur Rós) (Arranged by Stephen Prutsman) 3. Aha Gedawo (Getatchew Mekurya) 4. 12/12 (Cafe Tacuba) (Arranged by Osvaldo Golijov) 5. Wa Habibi - Beloved (Hamza El Din) (Realized by Tohru Ueda) 6. Death is the Road to Awe - from the Fountain - (Clint Mansell)Arranged by Kronos. INTERMISSION Second set with special guest Wu Man 1. The Cusp of Magic, first movement (Terry Riley) 2. Lullaby (traditional Iranian) 3. Mehbooba Mehbooba (Rahul Dev Burman) (Arranged by Stephen Prutsman and Kronos) 4. Alap -
from Raga Mishra Bhairavi (Ram Narayan) (Arranged by Kronos, transcribed by Ljova) 5. Long Ge (Jack Body) 6. Excerpt from Ghost Opera (Tan Dun) ENCORES: 1. Ambushed Again 2. SSB"

they basically played different pieces from all over the world, but i think my favourite was their last piece, which was their version of jimi hendrix' version of the american national anthem.
the concert was overall very good, but a couple of things were a bit annoying:
people in the us who go to classical concerts obviously don't know, that you can tell when a piece is over from the fact that the musicians put down their instruments. so there was a lot of stupid in-between clapping. they will also give standing ovations for almost anything they hear, so i seriously wonder what they will do when they see a truly exceptional performance. set themselves on fire?
plus, it was an outdoor venue and the sound was amplified, thus kind of poor acoustics. they also used a lot of samples, which was ok given what they played, though i would rather have listened to a concert by them without samples. it was still a very impressive performance, so i recommend going if you get a chance.

spanisches omelett

damit nicht nur rebekka in den genuss meines spanischen omeletts kommt, hier das rezept, das uebrigens von jose, meiner spanischen bildhauerteenagerliebe stammt:

erstmal: ohne beschichtete pfanne laeuft hier gar nichts.

ein paar kartoffeln kochen, pellen, in scheiben schneiden, in olivenoel zu bratkartoffeln verarbeiten. eine gewuerfelte zwiebel und knoblauch mitbraten, sowie etwaiges vorhandenes gemuese, z.b. zucchini, paprika. kleingeschnittene getrocknete tomaten sollten nicht fehlen...
wenn das gemuese einigermassen gar ist und die kartoffeln ein bisschen braun. salz und pfeffer dazu, rosmarin oder thymian nach geschmack und falls vorhanden.
dann ein paar eier (genug, um das, was schon in der pfanne ist, zusammenzuhalten, also mindestens vier) mit salz, pfeffer und paprikapulver verschlagen und ueber den pfanneninhalt kippen. alles ein bisschen platt-und zusammendruecken. bei kleiner hitze die eier stocken lassen. der trick ist, dass die eier fest genug werden, um das omelett umzudrehen, ohne dass es vorher anbrennt. zum umdrehen das omelett auf einen grossen teller schieben, mit der pfanne abdecken und in einem schwung umdrehen. noch ein bisschen weiterbraten und dann isses fertig. die richtige salzmenge zu treffen ist uebrigens auch eine herausforderung. also dann...

getting started in l.a.

seems like i actually live in los angeles now. and in order to give people in berlin and elsewhere an impression of what's going on here, i'm now starting this blog. in german or english, depending on what mood i'm in and who is supposed to be able to understand what i'm talking about.
today was my first day of classes at the university of southern california, where i'll be working on my phd (philosophy) in the next five years. nothing exciting has happened so far, expect that i learned today that in every student housing building there's somebody who provides all residents with condoms. different flavors and sizes available. so now i know who the condom bucket girl in my buidling is. the bucket, however, also contains candy, so if you're shy, you can pretend to be asking for candy...

by the way: in case you haven't watched "vanishing point" (yes, the second group of girls in "death proof" talks about it while having coffee), check out the trailer on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q71M88B12WA
and then watch the movie. you'll find out why.