Sent by Judy… it is so true.
(From Jeffro’s Anatomy of a Hipster series.)

So cookies basically helped me make it through my thesis. As Margarita and I madly typed, sitting across from each other at her dinning room table, she buttressed herself against the pain with power smoothies while I sublimated it with coffee and cookies.

During a recent dissertation defense, a colleague joked that she was tempted to dedicate her dissertation “to tea.” While every laughed at the ridiculous and endearing joke, a mild horror crept over me as I realized that I, in fact, had mentioned cookies in the acknowledgements section of my thesis.

It was with a fond appreciation of our sweet buttery friends that I began my PhD education at UC Irvine, as well as culinary education focused on cookies (albiet more ad-hoc). It started when one of our admin staff had to do a variety of bizarre tasks to sort out the behind-the-scenes details of my fellowship. I am still not clear on what happened, but as I understand it had a lot to do with too many pockets of money with too many random restrictions. The point is that something was screwed up, and someone worked extra hard to unscrew it. And for this, I decided to make them cookies.

Emboldened by a KitchenAid mixer, somehow the recipe was doubled, and before I knew it I was taking cookies to all kinds of admin staff. Surely it was only a matter of time before they each would do something deserving of edible thank-yous, and so I figured it couldn’t hurt to bank some karma (Tip for grad students: Eating cookies with admin staff actually gives you time to learn a little about them. I certainly didn’t plan it that way, but it is nice to have so many cookie-filled smiles around).

When I told my friend Gabe about the cookies, he excitedly sent me off to try a recipe from the New York Times. I suppose that was the beginning of the end. The recipe, however, while completely fantastic, was not nearly as interesting as the attached article, evocatively entitled “Perfection? Hint: It’s Warm and Has a Secret.”

Interspersed in a cookie-fan-boy narrative were fantastic tips with explanations that made my engineering heart quicken. For example, did you know that it is important to let your dough refrigerate? It turns out that when you mix your ingredients, you are basically wrapping your flour in butter, preventing the eggs from getting through and working their magic. The solution? 24-36 hours in the fridge gives eggs time to work through the butter and work their magic! Of course they say the “proof is in the <cookie-based alternative to pudding>”, and after making a batch (double, of course), I was stunned at how good they were.

Since the NYT episode, I have moved on to other varieties, scouring the web for the same kind of technical explanations of what is actually happening during the cooking process. This UCI oven has popped out peanut butter, chocolate mint, ginger, and most recently, biscotti — cranberry, pistachio, pine nut biscotti, to be precise — and most of them aren’t half bad. I, meanwhile, have learned about letting ingredients come to room temperature before mixing, the awesome power of parchment paper, letting your cookie sheet cool between batches, and (sadly) the horror of doubling everything in a recipe except the flour (cooked butter anyone?).

At this rate “to cookies” may end up earning my dissertation dedication (that, or “the gym”), but until then I am amazed at how amenable cookies are to my geekiness. I am presenting in class today, so I figured I would whip up a batch of cookies for everyone. I thought about the biscotti, and was momentarily tempted by the ginger cookies — but man, those NYT cookies are just amazing.

Check them out for yourself: The recipe, and the play by play. (Oh, and be sure to send me your favorites too!)

Top 10’s were popular this year, perhaps inspired by the end of a decade: Top 10 LOLCats, Romantic Comedies, One Hit Wonders of the ’90s, ’80s, ’70s and so on.

One might almost think top 10s passe, but as one friend of mine explained: “I’ve been loving it! I have been looking at all these top 10 movie lists, revisiting favorites, and catching the ones I never got around to.”

Last year was particularly important for me. Particularly with my graduation from Georgetown, and a move to UC Irvine, a lot has changed. How funny — I just realized that a decade ago (1999) was the year I graduated from high school and moved away to college. New beginnings, new opportunities, I suppose.

Well, without further delay, 2009 in 10 bite size pieces.

1. Carly & Kyle’s Wedding

Early this year, Steve and I flew to Walt Disney World where I was the man of honor in Carly’s wedding. It was not nearly as cheesy as I am sure they can be, and we had the added benefit of great January weather and world-class theme parks.

2. Inauguration Day

It might have been freezing as we walked towards the National Mall on that January morning, but there was something in the air. Gathered with throngs of people from near and wide, Steve and I were there to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama.

3. A PhD Tour

After applying to a variety of PhD programs, March and April was full of visits to various programs to find just the right fit. In the end, UC Irvine was the right place for me. Of course there is a down side to visiting so many wonderful places: I still feel sad that I somehow couldn’t smash all the schools together into some super-awesome-omni-uber-program. Le sigh. I suppose that is what conferences are for.

4. “Intertechnical Bodies” at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference

This year I co-chaired a panel at the ACLA conference at Harvard University with Dora Danylevich and Megan McCabe. The conference was great, of course, and the panel and my paper were received well. However, most important were the long conversations with good friends, and the opportunity to see first-hand how some of the humanities approach their work.

5. I am an ID, sure, but mostly I am done.

“I am an ID” was the title of my Georgetown thesis. Two years in the making (with one grueling semester there at the end), my thesis examines how the ability to persist our personal data with technologies like databases changes the ways we present ourselves, and perhaps how we think of ourselves as well.

6. Georgetown Graduation

After two years it was time to thank Georgetown, throw a big party, and move along. Don’t we look fancy?

7. The most direct route from point A to B never involves a rental truck.

This summer I packed up my Dupont condo, and moved across the country in a 16′ truck. I-80 in Pennsylvania is not recommended, the people in Chicago are lovely, a stop in Utah was the perfect way to break the trip up, and most importantly, driving across the plains with a cat on your lap is the only way to go.

8. Welcome to UC Irvine

It was my friend Shawn King who drove with me for the last leg of the drive to California. We pulled in with that insane truck, and within hours had unloaded the whole thing and replaced it with a brand new VW GTI — such a sweet ride. Oh, and the school is nice too. See?

9. Apparently what I say matters!

Getting my research on craigslist and Foucault accepted as a chapter hit the top 10 last year, but it has taken until just this month to go through the machinery and hit the presses. It’s on Amazon and everything.

10. Made it through Fall Quarter – whew!

There are a bunch of different things that have happened since I got to Irvine — on their own, they each seem to small for the list, but they are important none-the-less, and so I am placing them here in this catch-all. Since I got to Irvine I have launched two research projects, applied for a fellowship, written a number of conference workshop papers, am halfway done with a full conference paper, and just last week found myself submitting a grant to the NSF with Gillian Hayes, Paul Dourish, and Janet Vertesi – a dream team, I must say. It has been a busy quarter, but it looks like 2010 is already headed in the right direction.

When writing the literature review for my thesis, for example, and having spent so much time researching virtual communities, I decided that I should do more than read about them — I should live in one too! And so off I went to LambdaMOO, one of the most famous text-based virtual communities.

Sitting in my DC condo, I would slide my LambdaMOO existence off to one of my screens, while continuing to typing away in Word. A quick glance to the terminal with its black screen and white text was enough to remind me that somewhere else, some portion of me wasn’t enduring the pain of writing a thesis. This worked, kind of, but not for very long.

Eventually the blinking cursor became a burden; it would taunt me with accusations of abandoning the portion of my soul I had imprisoned into cyberspace. In moments of weakness, I would succumb to the cursor’s call. Yet interacting with LambdaMOO revealed how facile text-based interfaces can be, and it was clear that to participate in this “somewhere” would take a great deal of effort on my part. Unwilling to type long text descriptions of my “room” or “house” or whatever, LambdaMOO’s somewhere became a virtual “nowhere.”

Later that year, without quite realizing it, I did it again. This time I found myself wandering through Second Life. I had returned after discussing it in class, hoping that Second Life had grown up a bit and might have something more compelling to offer me this time around. In many ways it had, but I still was walking down empty virtual halls that uncomfortably reinforced the very thesis-isolation I was trying to avoid.

At some point I learned how to read the community announcements, several of which included ads for virtual raves featuring what apparently were some of Second Life’s hottest DJs. Perhaps only for the virtual company, for the next couple weeks I turned off iTunes, and sent my avatar off to different discos to listen to music (sometime broadcasting from actual club performances) and “dance” a harsh set of movements I had programmed into a macro set to endlessly loop. I would minimize my window and type away to the music, knowing that somewhere some generic representation of “me” was dancing the night away.

Fast forward to this last week. I have, with some surprise, returned to blogging with a vengeance. I think the stress and the need to “escape” has something to do with it. However, I find it curious that this time I escaped, well, into my own life. Blogging in the past has been one of the best ways for me to think through things, but sometimes the obligation of virtual (non)readership make it stifling. That said, a lot has happened since I moved to California, and I haven’t had much time to reflect on it all. Between Thanksgiving creeping up and CCT friends talking to me about their current PhD application process, I have been thinking about the things that are important to me and how grateful I am to be at UCI.

Blogging also serves another function: I find that I write so that I don’t forget. For those who are familiar with some of my current work, you know that I have been researching online death. This work has had me thinking about a quote from Foucault:

“Writing so as not to die… or perhaps even speaking so as not to die is a task undoubtedly as old as the word.”

Foucault was certainly referring to the potential for immortality through writing, but I am wondering if my scratching away at this blog attempts the almost opposite effect: Writing so as to live. Sappy endings aside, I am amused at the demise of my LambdaMOO and Second Life accounts, as well as their associated neuroses. I’d have to admit, even in the midst of all of this stress, there is no where else I’d rather be.

In the meantime, please enjoy what I am declaring the cutest profile picture on Facebook:

David Fourel — I have no idea who you are (or how I even ended up on your profile), but bravo!

This is where I live. Apparently this is my new home. With images like these, so stunning they are almost trite, the whole thing is hard to believe, but this is what it looks like. It is surreal. I am a bit embarrassed to admit that it took me about a week after having arrived in Irvine to get to the beach (imagine me under piles of boxes). But as I drove down the Pacific Coast Highway, I grabbed my phone and called Steve.

“I can’t believe I live here…” The sensation was so profound that it had to be shared, however, after stammering out this statement, I found I had no way to express the sensation, not only of being in such a beautiful place, but also knowing that it was my beautiful place for the next five years.

The novelty of the experience presented some problem as well. I still don’t know how to explain the phenomenological effect of an ocean that goes so far that my brain cannot begin to understand it, or the waves whose collective thrashing is so vast that they can only be considered as tranquil. One thing is clear: this is a big change from D.C.

Those last couple months in DC were rough. Between attempts to wrap up projects at the AAMC and in my studio, prepare my condo to be rented (which could be a novel all in itself), and get myself across the USA in a 16′ Budget rental truck… well, it has been stressful.

In contrast, Irvine seems magnificently quiet. I probably have not stopped running since I got here, but between new cars, apartments, roommates, and cities, it feels like I suddenly have time to think. A million things are already happening — orientations, teacher trainings, new research groups, papers, and oh so many boxes! — but it is all so vast, and perhaps so overwhelming, that I find the only option is to swim with the current and see where it might lead me. There a tranquility in sheer newness of it all. It will be interesting to see where the next five years lead me, and who “West Coast Jed” might be.

As midnight approached, Steve eagerly waited for it to officially be my birthday before he produced a gift. Simultaneously the most ridiculous and awesome gift ever, I got the world’s only internet connected bunny, a Nabaztag! (Really, it is kind of crazy, so you should just click on the link.)

After promptly naming him “Peru”, I struggled for about an hour to introduce him to his new Internet-based home (turns out that Airports need some extra configuration – why? No clue.), and then somehow let a couple more hours slip by teaching him to wake me up in the morning, play NPR, read Twitter tweets, and practice Tai-Chi. (You didn’t click that link, did you? You might want to now.)

Minka is confused. “You better learn how to tell the weather”, Peru threatened at one point. Still my favorite effect has to be the twitter updates. I follow this emo-rockstar who tweets the most over the top thoughts you can imagine. The only thing better that reading a tweet such as “Murder by sunrise…” is hearing a white plastic bunny randomly say it in a British accent.

Understandably, I was late to the office the next morning. Here coworkers casually took me out to lunch (Vijay will be out of the country when I move), and I was surprised with a LOL-homage when I got back to my desk.

Steve and I had made brownie bites the night before (waiting for midnight and a bunny, no doubt), and so I declared 2:30 PM “It’s my birthday so we are eating brownies” time, and invited everyone to my “corner cubicle” (yes, I have arrived).

That night, I was blown away at a casual birthday happy hour to which everyone attended. It was an evening full of unexpected moments of kindness, such as this discovery by Kristina:

Friends came from all over – from the AAMC, to CCT, and all the random places in between. People kept asking me if I was “having a good day”, and I honestly did. Not because I felt like I was supposed to, not because it was any big day with big expectations, but because of a continuous stream of thoughtful moments from people who care. Thank you all!

Honestly, I think that Steve was more upset than I was. I promptly filed the event under “what can you do?” and “am I going to be late to work?” I then quickly checked my calendar to see when the day’s meetings were, and then my watch to see if I could catch the work-shuttle from Dupont Circle.

Don’t get me wrong, I was upset, but I didn’t really know what one could do besides twitter regret into the cloud:

Scooter stolen. Le sigh. I suppose it was only a matter of time.

On Facebook, my friend George (who seems to always have the best comments) wrote:

DC’s way of saying good bye

Carly was far more… emotive:

total effing crap. screw that city.

This wasn’t a surprise. I bought the scooter right before grad school, hoping that if I was lucky it would stick around for my two years at Georgetown. With only one month before I leave DC, it has been almost exactly two years.

There is a pattern to scootering that I love: quick accelerations from stop lights, deft weaving down the street, and circumventing much of DC’s obnoxious traffic. A scooter in DC changes your relationship with distance, and as such, the city itself. Loosing Gui has already impacted my relationship with the District, but perhaps is preparing me for the changes about to come. For one, scootering laws in California are very strict, and between a required motorcycle driver’s license, and the fact that my particular model might not even be allowed on California’s streets, I really didn’t know what I was going to do with my scooter when I moved. I figured I would I have to switch over to a bike.

Since the day Gui left I have done just that. I have been riding a wonderful bike I bought from Father Zimmer, a CCT professor who had to sell all of his custom built bikes when he found himself promoted to the Vatican. It is a beautiful cyclo-cross that I had predominatntly used on local bike trails; I have never been able to capture the finess possessed by other urban bikers throughout DC.

I am finding that urban biking has a different pattern than scootering, but one I am thoroughly enjoying. Quick accellerations are replaced with a mild discregard for stop signs; whipping through lanes is replaced by whipping around corners; computing the distance of cars is replaced by constantly recomputing gear settings.

Of course it doesn’t replace the scooter, nor should it, I suppose. Life changes: scooters come and go, as do cities and our times in them. Bicycles, California, and a PhD — just new patterns to enjoy.

Much to my mother’s chagrin, I have never quite gotten into the habit of taking a daily vitamin. Now I am a fairly nutritionally minded individual (just don’t ask my gym buddy); this largely means I know my macro-nutrients, the details of the Krebs cycle, what a ketone is, and drink a protein shake after my workouts (most of the time).

But when it comes to a simple daily vitamin, I have never quite gotten there. Perhaps this the byproduct of a mother for whom one vitamin quickly explodes into a dozen more to supplement the first’s deficiencies. Perhaps this is a Pavlovian response to too much vitamin B dumped on a dehydrated and dancing body, and the inevitable sick stomach and vomiting the occurred to often during my undergraduate days. Honestly, the pills are huge, and they scare me a bit.

Of course this is silly, and so I recently decided to try again. I had seen a random commercial for these new adult gummy vitamins (cue awesome music). Ever since I have been casually hunting for them all over the district, but our essentialist-CVSs appear to not carry them.

Last week, while vacationing up north, and randomly in a Walmart in Vermont, (crescendo awesome music) there they were! “VitaCraves“! Ridiculously priced, ridiculously not-”complete” (e.g., 50% Biotin, whatever that is), ridiculously irresistible. They had to go home with me, although with Baudrillard’s simulacra on the brain I knew they would probably join the other dusty bottles of pills on that shelf I can’t quite reach in my kitchen.

Oh blog reader,  I have no idea what I have done. For these gummy-enhanced vitamins you give 10 calories, but they are the best 10 calories I have ever eaten. Those other vitamins? Let’s admit it, I just forget to take them. These? I am obsessed. You are supposed to take two a day, and I enjoy them a little too much. I quickly found myself wondering if it was okay to take four (or forty) instead. I find myself considering eating only one in the morning  and saving the other for later. I stare at the bottle, willing it to be 24-hours later so that I can take some more. They taste way better than they should.

Most importantly, I get to eat something sugary and delicious and feel good about it — for the first time in my life, however obsessively, I am taking my daily vitamin. My mother would be proud.