LAST BLOG

This is going to be my last blog post as I am really short on time. But, do not worry, you can't shut me up that easily - I will still be sending group emails and posting pictures on facebook (it's just the combination of doing that with the blog that is too time consuming). This means that you will no longer be able to get my news by stealth, if you want it you'll have to be on the email list - so email me at jess.f.harding@gmail.com if you want on... I don't send them often (every two months or so). Sorry about the lack of pics on this blog but they are on facebook if you are interested....

It's been a long time since I've written. Things seem less exciting now I guess - as NY becomes home rather than a new experience.

That being said, it's a pretty amazing home. There's so many things to love about the city and it was so incredible having Beth, Mikey, Stacey, Phoebe, Alice and Max to explore them with.

My new favourite part of the city is Chelsea. It makes me wish that I could be a millionaire and afford to live there. There is this amazing public park called the Highline built on an old elevated railroad track - a triumph of community organizing and urban design. (See the pics on facebook - http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=270145&id=623451051&l=fc7a5a4fa8). Beth and Mikey were here for New Years Eve which we spent watching the NY skyline from Brooklyn Bridge. We did lots of other fun things while they were all here, it was amazing, except that it was sad seeing them all leave.

I adore all the museums, which is lucky, as while most of you are enjoying the beach, I am still wading through snow and negative temperatures. I console myself by thinking I'd rather go to a museum than the beach anyway but your pictures on facebook are making it difficult to keep that preference! Two of my favourite museums are MOMA and the Tenement Museum (all about NYC immigration), and we also went to Ellis Island museum as part of our Statue of Liberty trip, as well as the Brooklyn museum party, which I've written about before but seriously... a party in a museum, what could be better?! I am going to the Tenement museum again this weekend, they do these awesome tours, and anyone who knows me knows that I love museum tours...

Alongside the intellectual exploration of NYC's immigrant past I've been enjoying the more tangible aspects - food. Chinatown, Koreatown, Curry Hill. Not to mention restaurant week where all the best, most expensive, NYC restaurants offer cheap prix fixe menus - so far I've been to three - it's so nice to experience a bit of luxury given my usual student lifestyle of lugging 100s of pounds of groceries home on the subway (and don't even get me started on the annoyance of the lack of a metric system, not to mention the difficulty of writing the date).

Mum arrives in three weeks and I am unbelievably excited about that. I'm hoping she loves NYC despite the fact that she doesn't like big cities.... It might be a bit of a challenge but I've identified all the greenest parts of the city. We are also going to Washington to meet Max for a week too and we are planning days at all the Smithsonians (free museums - this whole blog is really just about museums, I'm sorry) as well as a tour of congress. Fingers crossed we spot Obama!

Aside from that, I have flights booked back to New Zealand and a job in Wellington so I'm super excited about that. I'll be working at the Centre for Social Research and Evaluation at the Ministry of Social Development and will be back in NZ from May 24th until August 31st. I am really looking forward to being back and catching up with everyone as well as a trip to Samoa with mum to escape from what will be four consecutive winters!

Anyway, university is already crazily busy so this is just a short update. Let me know your news!

The holiday season

It’s been a long time since I’ve written. I hope you are all well.

Merry Christmas!

Happy Holidays!

Life got a little crazy with ‘finals’ (end of semester assignments and exams) so this is going to be a long catch up blog. Basically the highlight was Max arriving mid November but there have been lots of others....

Thanksgiving

The ultimate American holiday. While the politics of what is being celebrated are questionable, the food was amazing. Laura cooked for 12 in our tiny apartment, which was an amazing feat, especially given she made everything from scratch – and I mean everything – including bread to make into stuffing. YUM.





Aside from the food we also made a committed 5.45am trek to the Macy’s parade – an impressive spectacle of American consumerism.

Max found the balloons creepy.

Philadelphia

Max and I then headed to Philadelphia for the long weekend. We got a lot of American history. We enjoyed learning about ‘we the people’ at the Constitution centre and loved the Philadelphia food market and the Museum of Modern Art.

Max in Manhattan

As I said, this was a crazy time for me, and Max was working hard too – he’s got an internship at the American Civil Liberties Union in the human rights program and is working on a big international mooting competition (where one pretends to be a lawyer – although it’s more important than that makes it sound). We did manage to do some fun exploring though. Probably the highlight was a free party at the Brooklyn museum which they hold every month. It’s amazing. They open up the museum for free and have all kinds of activities and have a dance party in the gallery. It’s walking distance from my house and the event represents the diversity of my neighbourhood so well – there were Caribbean mothers dancing with their children next to wealthy looking 60 year old couples who were dancing next to fashionable hipsters of all ethnicities. It’s so unusual to have such a cross-section of society enjoying events together and I loved it. We’ve done lots of other New Yorky things including Central Park, the Met, shopping in Soho and watching ice-skaters at the Rockefeller Centre.

Christmas

Next was our WHITE Christmas. In fact, I was regretting wishing for a white Christmas after we got stuck in the snow for 9 hours on our trip back from Boston. Anyway we went to Boston to some of Max’s family who were ‘fab to the Max’ (one of their phrases). We loved Boston. We caught up with a friend who’s at Harvard and gave us the tour – it was particularly picturesque in the snow, the whole city is very picturesque in fact. Christmas was great. We had a Christmas Eve party with Max’s aunt and her friends, then went out to another of her friends’ families for Christmas. Everyone was very welcoming and I got fab presents – lots of cookbooks and candy.

Now I’m back in New York and enjoying being on holiday especially as Phoebe, Alice, Stacey, Beth and Mikey are all here from NZ. It’s fun being a tourist with them. That’s all for now as I’m off to meet Phoebe and Alice to go to MOMA. Sending you lots of love from the blizzard in New York – seriously cars are buried under snow drifts!

xxx

Fall, football, halloween

New York is not America.

Or at least that's how it feels, which is lucky, in my opinion, given the political climate evident in the recent elections.

However, I did experience the real America! I went to Annapolis, the capital of Maryland, for a football game. A Navy football game.

It was everything I imagined and more: fried food, the national anthem, chants ("Go Navy, Beat Army" – although they weren’t actually playing the army …), planes flying overhead, the navy school boys in uniforms doing pushups when their team scored (there was a real incentive for their team to win as it meant that the navy school all got a night off), and tailgating (which does not mean follow too closely, but describes how people have bbqs in the carpark of the stadium before the game). My only complaint is that games take four or so hours – I don’t know how anyone can care after that long.



The rest of the trip was great too - we stayed in a historic bed and breakfast where we had high tea, there was the best fudge shop ever, I had American style sushi (ridiculous), and we went on a tour of the state capital with a hilarious feminist guide.




Another totally American experience (even in New York) was Halloween.

My friend Leslie had a super extreme Halloween party.

The menu was as follows:

Mummies in a blanket (which are the spooky cousins to pigs in a blanket)

Baked Jack-o-lantern nacho dip and chips (vegetarian)
Pumpkin and Ghost Sandwiches

Homemade Iced Halloween sugar cookies

Vanilla Halloween cupcakes

Chocolate spider cupcakes

Spider web cotton candy and chocolate eyeballs

Green Ghoul cocktails with worms

Orange and black Happy Halloween cocktails with spiders.

We carved pumpkins which was super fun too and got goody bags to take home.

Then on Sunday night I went out in the Village for the Halloween parade. Basically it’s a participatory event where any who’s dressed up can march – some of the costumes were amazing – but it’s really the general atmosphere that everyone goes for. Everyone dresses up and the streets are madness. Next year I want to go to DC as apparently you can go Trick or Treating on Embassy Row and get candy from all around the world.

Thanks for all the lovely birthday wishes all. I had a great time with a few of my friends here. We had a fall themed dessert party with pecan pie, spiced apples and spiced apple cider and pumpkin muffins.

This blog is all about food, which I guess shows you some of the real America. Although one great paradox to me is how many amazing bakeries there are in NYC but how skinny the people are. They have a self control that I do not.

Things I’ve been thinking lately – ways to communicate.

I’m reading a lot at the moment. In fact I’ve been reading pretty much all the time and it’s making all too obvious how similar journal articles are to each other, and how scientific writing is all the same. So I’ve been thinking about ways to communicate academic concepts more appropriately for both the general population and policy makers.

Pedro Noguera, a sociologist who works with urban schools, came to our colloquium this week and he talked about how one of the threads of his research is ‘making the familiar strange’. For instance, we know that socioeconomic status (SES) strongly predicts student grade point average (GPA), which is seriously unfair but also widely ignored and forgotten. In a project that Noguera et al. did, they created a map of San Francisco where they mapped GPA onto suburbs to show that elevation of a neighbourhood is strongly related to GPA. The wealthy like to live on hills. The map was so powerful that is was on the front of the San Francisco Chronicle and suddenly something everyone knew was compelling again.

It’s difficult to break out of the mold though, even writing the above I initially wrote SES and GPA without any explanation of what the acronyms mean, which is not helpful for clear communication.

Then I went to a Zadie Smith reading. Dream. She read from her book of essays and they were so witty, articulate and insightful. I don't see why more academic writing can't be creative - it's so effective. Unfortunately in psych we’re still trying to convince everyone we’re a science.

So one day I will write a novel or super creative journal articles. For now I’ll write my blog. I’ll work on making it more interesting.

Daily living

A lot of people have told me I should update my blog more regularly. I feel like I do it often. I think I’ve posted very two weeks or so and I’m sure no one wants more of my news than that – aside from mum that is, who I email every day.

Speaking of every day, here is what my life is like here.

I wake up and talk to Max, while eating Granola. I really miss toasted muesli and weetbix. So far I’ve found it impossible to buy cereal that’s not full of sugar. I get ready and head in to uni (or “school” if I’m being American) just after 7am. Commuting has made me a meaner person. I started off very cognizant of who should get first priority on seats, now I fight to sit down so I can do my reading; although I’ve mastered the art of standing, reading, highlighting, and making notes. I have seen ridiculous things on the Subway: a homeless lady going toilet into a cup in the entrance (I almost cried) and an unbelievable breakdancing, acrobatics show – people literally doing back flips in the middle of the subway car. My commute is about 40mins.

When I arrive in the city I have my favorite street to walk down from the subway station, which has my favorite fruit seller, my 45cent bagel shop, and my favorite pastry shop (there are so many amazing ones everywhere, thank you early Italian immigrants).

I do my work all day and I’ve already blogged about my classes. I also have to work 20hours a week on a research project and I’ve decided to work on the Early Adolescent Cohort Study, which is a longitudinal study of diverse youth. I should get to conduct interviews with some of the youth so I’m excited about that and there’s so many different things in the study so there’s lots that I’m interested in. The general university environment is so intellectually stimulating too. I’ve been to public lectures by Nick Clegg (the UK deputy Prime Minister), by a congressman and by numerous big deal psychology professors (the academic celebrity is a curious US phenomenon). There’s always free food at these events too.

After school I either go to the gym, yoga, or Wholefoods, and then cook and do more work.

Aside from general life, there is always something exciting to look forward to. Recently, I’ve been to the Lion King on Broadway and then to Magnolia’s bakery (very famous).

I’ve walked Brooklyn bridge and then spent the day in Brooklyn Bridge Park, right on the water - it’s so nice that Manhattan is an island. I went to the Cloisters, which is the medieval collection of the Met museum and such a beautiful area, again, right on the water.

I went to a great movie about America’s failing school system, which inspired me. I love to just wander the city and feel that it won’t be long until I become one of the New York City snobs who think this is the only real city in the world and won’t live anywhere else but here. That being said, I am very excited to come back to Wellington for summer break next year and see you all in NZ (and eat kumara).

So that’s my life – tell me about yours please?

P.s. Here are some pics of my furnished apartment, more are on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=204174&id=623451051&l=b9aab20194)