And There was Much Rejoicing

Even though classes have been pretty much over for a couple of weeks now, I still had the exit exam to pass before I was officially finished with the MS Finance program at the U. of Utah. This past Thursday--yes, one day before graduation--I finally took the exit exam. Later that afternoon I received the following message:

Dear MSF Student:
CONGRATULATIONS! You passed the comprehensive exam requirement for your MSF degree. If you are "walking" in the graduation ceremony tomorrow, have a great time. You deserve to be proud of your degree. [I will spare you the further details of my awesomeness.]
 
So with the exit exam successfully passed, I was all set to walk on Friday. While convocations aren't known to be that exciting, it was great to see some of the people from the program. It feels great to be done with the MSF program, but I still have a lot of studying ahead. In June I'm taking the CFA Level II test (there are 3 levels and I have already passed Level I). It will be very difficult so I need to stay focused a bit longer. At least now I have one less thing to worry about.

Here are some pictures from graduation:

 

Greatest Con

Let's see who can follow this article. It's one of the best that I've seen on the subject in quite a while. Of course, you always have to take these types of articles with a grain of salt, but it is well thought out and explained. Questions?

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/guest-post-heres-setup-con-decade

My Brief Stint as a Grad Student

"Education is a form of self-delusion."
~Elbert Hubbard, 1856-1915, American author, editor and printer

I don't remember exactly what I was expecting to feel like doing after passing my thesis defense. Something along these lines: indulging my vanity with an extravagant shopping spree at Banana Republic. Or flaunting a wad of cash (not mine, because I don't have any) during a celebratory dinner at Log Haven Restaurant, one of those places in Salt Lake City where the main courses sound like this, "Shinshu miso grilled Japanese eggplant with Thai chile ponzu," and the waiter brings out a tablespoonful of odd-colored fare on a square white plate with a 12-inch diameter. Or the spontaneous purchase of plane tickets to Jules Sea Lodge in Key Largo, Florida, described as follows:

Located at the bottom of the Emerald Lagoon in Key Largo Undersea Park, Florida, this undersea lodge invites you to spend a night sleeping with the fish. Located 30 feet below the sea, the only way to get into your room is with scuba gear. Once you dive down and swim into this underwater ‘cottage’, you can relax and enjoy views of the marine life through windows in both bedrooms and living room. The facility also comes fully equipped with refrigerators, sinks, enclosed shower and toilet, entertainment center with VCR and DVD set up, mini kitchen with microwave, telephone, intercom and marine radio.

Instead I felt like a deflated balloon. Defending my thesis was anti-climactic. Like waking up on your 26th birthday and expecting to somehow feel new and shiny, invigorated with the mental acuity and clarity of perspective that supposedly comes with one more year's worth of living. I sat through the defense thinking one thought every time a professor asked me a question about postmodern deconstructionist theory or Shakespeare's inheritance of Ovidian metaphor: "IDK." Fortunately, my answers to such questions were slightly more articulate. Slightly.

And when my committee asked me to leave the room so they could confer, I felt, momentarily, like the last contestant in a beauty pageant, huddling with her fingers crossed and uttering a silent prayer in the soundproof booth while watching her fellow contestants answer the final question before the judges announce whether she has won the title of second runner up or Miss Universe. And when my committee called me back in and said, "Congratulations, you've passed your defense, sign here, goodbye!" I thought, "That's it?" 

Yes. That's it. The end. No more literary criticism for me. If I've learned anything in the last two years, it's this: "Education is a form of self-delusion." Which is different than admitting that the master's degree was a waste of time. I think I simply expected to feel distinguished, or, erudite, or much more accomplished at the end of those two years. Truthfully, I've mastered nothing, except for maybe the art of pretending to look interested in someone who's talking to me about things I will never understand.

The highlight of my graduate education is encapsulated in this quote from an email exchange between me and my thesis chair, in which my thesis chair responds to my last-minute acknowledgment, the day before my defense, that reading the collected works of Stephen Greenblatt in all my spare time might have made me feel more prepared for the impending onslaught of nebulous questions I was about to receive: "But as you say, at some point you just have to get on with LIFE, which is enhanced by books but not found in them." Four semesters of graduate tuition was worth it, to get that advice, I suppose.

At least that's my current assessment of the situation. Perhaps I'll know, years later, the real reasons for going through all this.

My brief foray into the trenches of academia--or rather, my cautious tiptoeing toward the edge of the trenches--has shown me that I am meant to do other things, and to write things that people can, and will actually read.

If I hadn't bothered to apply to the program, I would have spent the rest of my life wondering "What if?" with John Greenleaf Whittier's lines perpetually gnawing my conscience: "For of all sad words of tongue or pen, / The saddest are these: "It might have been!"

Now that I know, I can get on with life, as my thesis chair says. I think I'll fare better in the company of hyperactive prepubescent people who may or may not be able to write complete sentences.

Cautionary Tales

While Sarita and I were in Kotzebue this past Christmas, we passed some time organizing and going through old photos, artwork, pictures, and books. One of the books that I tend to gravitate towards each time we visit is Struwwelpeter: Fearful Stories and Vile Pictures to Instruct Good Little Folks, written by Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann and illustrated by Sarita Vendetta. Sarita was kind enough to get me this book for my birthday along with The Gashlycrumb Tinies, by Edward Gorey, a grim abecedarian of rhyming couplets, as well as Slovenly Betsy, also by the good Dr. Hoffmann.

While Sarita and I like to amuse ourselves by reading cautionary tales for children, we have been waiting patiently for an opportunity to share these lovely adventures with actual children. Well, the other day two of our little neighbors came over to play for a while in the evening--two girls aged 7 and 3. Since Sarita was entertaining herself by working on her thesis introduction, I took it upon myself to entertain our guests. Aside from playing Killer Bunnies, we also found time to read some of the stories from Struwwelpeter. But the book that really got their attention was The Gashlycrumb Tinies, which we read in its entirety. At first I started reading the books as a joke and I didn't think the girls would like them, but we talked about the morals of the stories and they loved them. I'll have to ask their dad what he thought of their new-found interest in reading when they showed him some of their favorite drawings (shown below)! I admit that I had forgotten how graphic some of the pictures are!

Hopefully our kids someday will be just as interested in reading these stories together.

On another note, Sarita got a wonderful book for me for Valentine's Day that was written by someone who was in one of her reading endorsement classes with her. It is entitled The UnValentine. We'll have to read this one with the girls next time.

Vacation All I Ever Wanted

Little Red Rubber Boots

We have one Christmas tradition in our family. It involves days of advance preparation, a bumpy 24-hour mile jaunt on the snow machine across the frozen ice of the Kotzebue Sound, and a motley assortment of bulky outerwear that makes us all look like homeless versions of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. This ritual is the "hunting of the Christmas tree." My dad's been orchestrating it since 1985. Ever year a Noatak River spruce tree, half naked on the side that lay strapped to the basket sled with bungee cords (naked because every time the sled runners hit a bump on the ice a hand full of needles fall off), completes the festive milieu.

One thing complicates this ritual: my dad's idea of organizing his stuff, in particular, 25 years' worth of cold weather outdoor clothing. He tosses everything into an assortment of cardboard boxes and stacks them in random places in the empty rooms of our house and the backyard storage shed. It takes a few days to find all the boxes.

This year, he brought out twelve cardboard boxes. Twelve boxes. Twelve boxes of hats, scarves, neck warmers, gloves, and mismatched wool socks. He dumped them into the living room and said, "We call this a dress-up party! See what you can find." I dug into the largest box, and while looking for a sock without a hole in the toe or heel, I fished out a pair of little red rubber boots. I immediately recognized them from a picture in our family photo album: I'm two years old, standing on top of a tundra cliff before the Noatak River valley, and I'm wearing these tiny red boots. I said, "I'm taking these back to Utah," and Dad warned, "Don't you throw those away. Those are family heirlooms!" Mom explained that my Aunt Nancy sent them to Noatak when she was living in England after her own children had grown out of them. The boots ended their transatlantic travels in the 80s and had spent the last 20 years buried in one of Dad's boxes.

I'd never understood my parents' compulsion to save everything. We have home videos that give you an idea of how much, and what kind of stuff, my parents used to save. There's a video of me dumping a week's worth of pre-kindergarten work out of my backpack and unfolding each paper while telling a story about each assignment. That's what they saved in the beginning—all the paper with wobbly tracings of their kids' names over dotted lines, or dittoed images of carrots and candy ("C" is for carrot and candy) scribbled in blue and carried home from kindergarten classes.

We moved three times by the time I had turned six. Moving so often must have forced my parents to throw some of that stuff away. But after we moved to Kotzebue in 1991 we had a bigger house. Therefore, we could save more stuff. The stuff also got harder to throw away as we got older. We graduated from kindergarten ABC worksheets with gold star stickers to countless extracurricular accolades from elementary, middle, and high school. All the medals, certificates, and ribbons were too good to throw in boxes in the back of the house.

So, our living room morphed into a museum that archived the relics of our childhood and adolescent accomplishments. The pictures Merella and I drew and entered into art contests hung on the ceiling. We worked in a variety of mediums—charcoal, collage, graphite, watercolor—and anyone looking at our pictures could pinpoint our discovery of linear perspective and understanding of complimentary color schemes. On the rest of the walls hung Landon's Alaska State Athletic Association medals for wrestling, and Willaby's blue ribbons from the Alaska State Science and Engineering Fair, with the titles of her projects, such as, "Identifying the Fungal Root Associates of Platanthera Orbiculata," written on the back. The walls were also covered with the numbers we pinned to our jerseys from years of running on the Kotzebue High School Cross-Country running teams, and a variety of perfect attendance certificates, congratulatory letters from the governors of Alaska, spelling bee awards, report cards, newspaper clippings that featured one of us on the front page, SAT/ACT vocabulary flash cards, copies of our graduation speeches, prom pictures, and acceptance letters to Macalester, Mount Holyoke, University of Alaska, BYU, Ripon College, Mesa State.

To me, not being able to clear this stuff off the walls and let it go was always a distinguishing feature of what I perceived to be my parents' sentimental older age. This year, C.S. Lewis and the red rubber boots put their pack rat phenomenon in perspective for me. In his "De Descriptione Temporum" Lewis says, "Nothing is ever quite finished with; it may always begin over again. And nothing is quite new; it was always somehow anticipated or prepared for. A seamless, formless continuity-in-mutability is the mode of our life."

Parenting is the story of this "continuity-in-mutability" with constant reminders of the not quite new and never unfinished. My parents saved things that suggested constant movement toward imminent independence and life on our own; they must have known that the souvenirs left on the walls would be in part what remained, after we left, to tide them over until we returned for Christmases and summers. This idea of their children growing up, leaving, and never fully returning wasn't quite new, because they'd already done it once before, when they left home themselves. And it will continue, and begin again when we have kids who grow up and away from us, and into lives more daring than what we imagine.

What I know now is that every remnant added to the walls was a reminder of what my mom and dad love most—us. This is what strikes me most about the red boots. They're signs of indelible moments that defined my mom and dad as parents, and me as a kid full of "the spirit of adventure," like the young Carl Fredrickson and Ellie in Up!, uninhibited without worrying that my boots didn't match the rest of my outfit, or how frizzy my hair was when my picture was being taken.

I'll make sure the boots are in our family for a long time. Jesse doesn't know it yet, but I intend to take pictures of all our kids wearing them. Each photo will be black and white, but the boots will be little splashes of red. I'll also document the travels of the little red boots, writing stories about all the places we went to and the adventures we had while our kids wore them. And this will be okay, because boys can wear red boots too, right? Okay, maybe we'll have to get some yellow ones. Someday I'll write a memoir or compilation of these stories and call it Little Red Rubber Boots.

Just kidding. Who has time for that?

But when we finally take those pictures, and have those stories to tell, I'll be sure to post them. By then, at Grandma and Grandpa's house in Alaska (or wherever they are), there will be space on their walls for these pictures and stories too.

Airport Atrocities

First of all, we had to be at the airport at 5 a.m. Need I say more? Apologies to our hosts and chauffeurs, Jesse's parents! Second, there was the couple whose questionable genders and embarrassing public displays of affection obstructed curbside traffic for several minutes; while waiting for them to take a breather and kindly get out of the way so we, and the 20 vehicles behind us, could get out and unload the van, we tried to determine whether they were a man and a woman, or two men. One of them had a beard... Finally, after winding through the labyrinthine security lines and observing the new full-body scanners--which were, by the way, just sitting there unused--it was time to divest ourselves of all coats, shoes, and metal to walk through the standard detectors. I walked through without beeping. Jesse beeped. The TSA officer made him walk back through three times, insisting that Jesse had something in his pockets, even after Jesse turned his pockets inside out all three times. So Jesse was herded over to the pat-down area and had to listen to variations on the theme of "Okay, sir, I'm going to squeeze between your legs now..."

Five minutes later we all discovered that Jesse had been wearing his watch the whole time. (Jesse's note: "I was very disoriented by the fact that the TSA worker INSISTED I had something in my pockets!")

We had three connecting flights: Ontario, CA to Seattle, Seattle to Anchorage. Anchorage to Kotzebue. In each airport and on every plane, someone had hit the replay button so that all we heard was "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" and "Santa Baby," the two most ridiculous Christmas songs in the universe. The Seattle to Anchorage flight, a three-hour ordeal, is the longest leg of the trip. On the Seattle to Anchorage flight, Jesse sat next to a portly Asian man whose eyes, when closed, disappeared into multiple folds of forehead and cheek fat; his nonstop snoring--a bubbly, sputtering sound of saliva trickling out toward an open corner of his mouth and then being sucked back in again--and his halitosis made him a delightful traveling companion.

We then faced the prospect of spending the night in the Anchorage airport because of low visibility during a snowstorm that had been raging all week in Kotzebue. For several days all three daily flights had been cancelled due to inclement weather. But the storm cleared up just long enough for us to land on time, and all was well. Our suitcases came off the plane caked in snow, it was 9 degrees with 35 mile-an-hour winds, and I started off my Christmas vacation in a jolly humor with frostbitten cheeks from the snow machine ride home!