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Yesterday arrived, July 1, probably the most beautiful day of the year. The freakish spring heat wave has been replaced by cool, almost chilly summer nights that lend the mornings a delicious hint of autumn. Yesterday was blustery and almost cool in the shade, with a sky of racing rags of white cloud against a field of crystal blue, like an October sky. Only it’s still sunny and summer, green and jolting with life.
I had lunch with a friend downtown, early at 11 a.m., and there was no one on the streetside patio but us, even in the busy heart of downtown. I put sugar in my coffee and the paper packets blew away in the wind that pushed the white clouds so swiftly across the sky. I told my friend that autumn had been my favorite season for years, but as I grew older I had learned to love summer.
She said she thought it might be because I am a plant person, and summer is when plants do their utmost, live their utmost. I said I thought she had an excellent point. Summer is so alive. Spring feels like the awakening of something sleeping or dead, fall like decline, winter like a little death. Summer alone seems utterly alive and devoted to life.
It’s summer and I am back in love with my garden. Six years of a combination of hard work and unchosen neglect have left me with a garden that’s both coming together and getting sloppy. I am finally learning to amend the soil, place plants according to their need (not mine), buy annuals. The empty spaces in my landscape are filling up with rhododendron, blueberry, lavender and stonecrop. Gladiolus, calla lily, and at last, my first dahlias. But meanwhile the side bed is taken over by mugwort, a pretty weed.
But I’ve learned to accept things as they are. I can live with the mugwort until I have time and money and knowledge enough to deal with it, and meanwhile enjoy the annual blooming of my Queen of the Night cactus, a plant whose flowers are so lovely I have considered having a party based around sitting in the front yard and watching the night-blooming fragrant white flowers open in the suburban darkness.
I never have done it, but it’s always a party for me when they open. I am batshit crazy for that plant.
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About a month ago, in the middle of the night, an ambulance with no siren on whisked my elderly neighbor away to the hospital. I usually sleep like a stone, so the lights and sound through my open bedroom windows woke me only enough to make me wonder, still half intoxicated with sleep, if I should get dressed since the ambulance had come for me. The next morning I realized what must have happened, that Nell had been taken in the night.
She thought she had food poisoning, but it was intestinal blockage and she had to have a section of her intestine removed. She spent a few weeks in the hospital, then a few more in a nursing care center recovering. She finally came home on Monday.
The neighborhood is changing, with its elders declining and moving to places where their fragility is protected.
A few evenings ago I was knitting a string bag and watching So You Think You Can Dance when the firetruck came down the street again with no siren on and I knew it was happening again. That thing is like a herald of evil.
I walked outside with a sick heart to see whom the bell was tolling for, which of the people whose lives and faces I knew. I saw a young blond man who looked about 15 or 16, who had heard a call on his shortwave radio — for someone having a stroke.
Shit.
I could see the truck had pulled up to the home of my neighbor Leonard, a man in his 80s. The young blond man, well-meaning but seemingly completely unaware that AN OLD MAN WAS HAVING A STROKE ACROSS THE STREET and his brain might be darkening like the lights in a house going out at night one by one, tried to talk to me like we were just neighbors out for a walk. So young, to not understand this was no place and time to be normal.
I walked across the street to my neighbor Ruth, in her 70s, in a green nightgown on the porch, crossing her arms against the nighttime cold. She and Leonard have been buddies for five decades. When I told her that Leonard was probably having a stroke my voice broke and I realized I was about to start crying.
Another neighbor joined us and as the attendants wheeled Leonard past us down the street on the way to feed him into the ambulance, Andie said, “We love you!” and I said “You hang in there, Leonard!” I had my arm around them and I felt like we were The Womenfolk of the neighborhood. The people who watch over when you are carried off by something beyond your control, and who hope you will be well soon.
And Leonard is well. He wasn’t having a stroke, though the doctors don’t yet know what’s wrong. They are trying him on different medications to fight the spells of being unable to move or speak, but he’s had a few good days in a row and could be home anytime.
I told my friend Randee about all the decline and change in my neighborhood — one elder is moving in with her nephew, and these two have had health crises. All these people are in their 80s or 90s. She said my street was on the verge of turning over just as hers had done twenty years ago when she first moved in. Many of her street’s elders died or moved to safer places and the reign of the neighborhood went to a younger generation of new parents and their children.
Which is what is happening here, slowly, though in a millennial twist it’s not quite families with kids who are moving in. One untenanted house was bought by an 83-year-old woman who lives alone. There’s the neighbor couple across from Leonard who are young, but have no children. There’s me–39, unmarried and childless. The street is indeed changing, but it’s not about to become Main Street USA with a family of four in every house. If ever streets really did that.
I told my neighbor Nell, the one who just came home, about all the changes on the street. She told me that she had seen the same thing happen when she moved in as a young mother, and she was one of the young ones on the street.
Of course. It’s not something that happens just once, this changing of the guard. It’s always happening. We all have our time to be young and our time to be whisked away in the night.
And everything in between.
Attention conservation notice: Skip this if you are totally satisfied with your job or are positive you know just how to figure out your chosen career path. Otherwise, read on.
Author Po Bronson spent two years following the lives of 70 people who “dared to be honest with themselves” about adressing the question What should I do with my life?
His answers are worth reading. Check out the nine-page Fast Company article (recommended) or the one-page version. (Or see if reading the one-pager convinces you that the 9-pager is worth a read.) Both are based on his NYT bestseller, What Should I Do With My Life?
So what if your destiny doesn’t stalk you like a lion? Can you think your way to the answer? That’s what Lori Gottlieb thought. She considered her years as a rising television executive in Hollywood to be a big mistake. She became successful but felt like a fraud. So she quit and gave herself three years to analyze which profession would engage her brain the most. She literally attacked the question. She dug out her diaries from childhood. She took classes in photography and figure drawing. She interviewed others who had left Hollywood. She broke down every job by skill set and laid that over a grid of her innate talents. She filled out every exercise in What Color Is Your Parachute?
Eventually, she arrived at the following logic: Her big brain loved puzzles. Who solves puzzles? Doctors solve health puzzles. Therefore, become a doctor. She enrolled in premed classes at Pepperdine. Her med-school applications were so persuasive that every school wanted her. And then — can you see where this is headed? — Lori dropped out of Stanford Medical School after only two and a half months. Why? She realized that she didn’t like hanging around sick people all day.
What am I good at? is the wrong starting point. People who attempt to deduce an answer usually end up mistaking intensity for passion. To the heart, they are vastly different. Intensity comes across as a pale busyness , while passion is meaningful and fulfilling. A simple test: Is your choice something that will stimulate you for a year or something that you can be passionate about for 10 years?
This test is tougher than it seems on paper. In the past decade, the work world has become a battleground for the struggle between the boring and the stimulating. The emphasis on intensity has seeped into our value system. We still cling to the idea that work should not only be challenging and meaningful — but also invigorating and entertaining. But really, work should be like life: sometimes fun, sometimes moving, often frustrating, and defined by meaningful events. Those who have found their place don’t talk about how exciting and challenging and stimulating their work is. Their language invokes a different troika: meaningful, significant, fulfilling.
Via MeFi, the Top Ten short video talks from TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), an annual conference that attempts to “bring together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives” — in 18 minutes or less.
1. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My stroke of insight” (I have heard from several very different people that this account of a brain scientist observing herself having a stroke is absolutely amazing)
2. Jeff Han: “Touchscreen demo foreshadows the iPhone”
3. David Gallo: “Underwater astonishments”
4. Blaise Aguera y Arcas: “Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo”
5. Arthur Benjamin: “Lightning calculation and other ‘Mathemagic’”
6. Sir Ken Robinson: “Do schools kill creativity?”
7. Hans Rosling: “The best stats you’ve ever seen”
8. Tony Robbins: “Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better”
9. Al Gore: “15 ways to avert a climate crisis”
10. Johnny Lee: “Creating tech marvels out of a $40 Wii Remote”
Today while driving home from the college I saved a mole.
I was driving along a four-lane stretch when I saw what looked like a leaf in the highway — or was it a small animal, a mouse? It looked injured if it was. I slowed down and pulled right up to it. It wasn’t moving right, with the almost cartoonish centipede-like scurry of a mouse. It wandered unevenly in circles with a lurching gait, as if hurt or confused.
Or blind.
It was a mole, unharmed but completely unsuited for movement above the ground, on macadam. Like the penguin that waddles on land and speeds like a bullet in water, it was out of its element, lumbering like a tiny seal. Its pink, clawed, paddle-like feet gave it the shambling grace of a hatchling turtle making for the sea.
I’ve learned you don’t take chances with life and death when you have the wherewithal not to. I stopped my car, grabbed a reusable shopping bag, flicked on my hazards and stepped out to see what I could do. The mole was pale dove gray with velvety-looking fur, not quite as long as long as my hand and blindly wandering four lanes of highway in the middle of the afternoon.
Before I saw the danger coming, a huge green pickup rolled right over the mole — but the wheels missed it as I stood frozen with panic and hope. It kept going at a blind shamble.
There wasn’t another car coming, so I walked over, leaned down and put down the bag in front of the mole, holding it open and hoping it would walk in so I could carry it to the grass. But it avoided the lip of the bag each time with its sensitive nose, turning away, refusing the trap.
I tried putting the bag on top of it, using the bag to protect my hand from a bite and carrying it to the side of the road. But it was wriggly and small, hard to catch.
Then I realized in my attempts to catch it I’d turned it back around towards the roadside, and we only had a few feet to go to get to the grass and dirt. I herded it with my feet over the road and into the dirt, guiding it in a relatively straight line to where the road ended and dirt and grass began.
When he hit dirt it took him about three seconds to disappear. I didn’t even see him dig. It was like he just pushed himself into the earth, and it yielded to him because it was where he belonged.
It’s Stitch and Pitch night, y’all!
Last year I only went to one ballgame, but it was a humdinger.
I’ll be at McCormick Field again tonight with my knit night gang & a crowd of friends celebrating the birthday of one of our number.
It’s Thirsty Thursday, so PBR’s and sodas are $1 all night. Let’s all get drunk on Pepsi! Hells yeah! Knitters rule!
Summer’s here! I’m on vacation! See you at the ballpark!
Please feel free to watch this outstanding video and insert “ball park” for every occurrence of “gay bar.”
Zac Sunderland, aged 16, is trying to become the youngest person ever to sail around the world in a yacht.
Alone.
This is his blog.
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The Enchanted Gypsy is a biofuel bus. Pixie and her husband, Moss (who clearly need to come live in Asheville), drive around the U.S. in it, raising their daughter and selling music and handmade items.
Pixie is a great writer and I find her courage and success in living her life exactly as she wants to very inspiring.
Her blog contains the most strangely powerful account of giving birth I have ever read. I’ve always asked people who have had babies what it felt like, and Pixie is the first to give me an answer that satisfied.
*******
Beautiful, happy sugar-porn and great easy ideas for sweets from Joy herself.
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A German expat explores and lives in Southeast Asia, always making it sound like something an ordinary person could do — and should do.
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If you like my blog, you will love this one. Author/natural science prof emeritus Chet Raymo explores science, faith and human nature from the perspective of someone so amazed to find himself alive on this beautiful planet that his work is a never-ending lovesong to creation.
Rob’s Amazing Poem Generator takes the text from a URL and generates a poem with it.
This one was generated using my blog, and cleaned up only slightly.
If you have a blog, won’t you generate a poem and paste a link?
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think they always changing
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that day of fun to it.
Do forever.
Sometimes this blog is quiet because bad things are happening.
Sometimes this blog is quiet because good things are happening.
Sometimes this blog is quiet because there’s nothing much to say.
Sometimes nothing much to say is a good thing.
I’m settling into summer, getting the yard caught up — yanking up the little patches of poison ivy, pulling weeds from between the stones and bricks of the patio, putting in stonecrop and rhododendron… A few times already I’ve gotten a little lost in the familiar sloughs of summer boredom, but I realized, when reading this old blog entry of mine, the tremendous progress I’ve made in learning to live alone. In learning to live, period.
The author of that “old” entry not yet even a year old impresses me with the way that she reveals an embarassing amount of suffering along with a total lack of submission to it. This summer, with new job leads, deeping friendships and fair amount of fun to go along with catching up on my gutters and weeds, things already feel different. And not just because of the unreliable fix of more and better things to do.
My life is slowly deepening and enriching, changing like leaves and detritus turn to rich compost. I am back in love with my sweet house, even more in love with my city, and every day brings me greater and greater awareness of how much I love and am loved by my circle of friends.
I had dinner with a friend last night and as we walked into the restaurant we saw a dear mutual friend there with her extended family, in town for a visit. The friend I’d come with, Laura, told us all a story of a friend of hers getting sick while vacationing in a nearby town, and Laura’s journey of driving to her projectile-puking friend in need and taking her back to Laura’s condo and caring for her.
“I’d do it for you,” she said, looking at our friend and then at me, and was told right back she could expect the same from us. We all kind of turned to one another and told one another that we would all indeed drive to Cherokee to rescue each other should we ever become projectile-pukers, and cart each other back home safe and see to each other until we were well. And it was true.
The point of this nerdy story is to show that this is the kind of tribe worth waiting a lifetime for. My only regret is the constraint of geography that doesn’t allow me to widen my circle to those I would welcome but who live far away.
This is a very fine life I have, not in material riches or even that many conventional accoutrements of contentment (a husband and family, a fat salary), but in gratitude and emotional and intellectual wealth.
Yesterday I woke at 6:15, had lunch with a friend, had dinner with another friend (helper to fallen projectile-pukers everywhere) and late in the evening caught a spectacular solstice moonrise.
Last night was a good night for the fabled “moon illusion,” which according to the buzz of the astronomy newsletters I read is especially spectacular at the summer solstice:
On Wednesday night, June 18th, step outside at sunset and look around. You’ll see a giant form rising in the east. At first glance it looks like the full Moon. It has craters and seas and the face of a man, but this “moon” is strangely inflated. It’s huge!
You’ve just experienced the Moon Illusion.
The buzz was totally right.
I drove to my local eastern horizon observing spot, a gravel residential parking lot overlooking a river valley with a clear horizon view blocked only by the unavoidable ring of mountains, and was met by a few fellow nature freaks. Moonrise was at 9:14 but it took awhile for the moon to clear the dark blue peaks of the Smokies.
We weren’t quite sure where due east was until the undersides of a little bank of low, dark clouds began to glow with an eerie golden light. It was the light of the still-hidden rising moon. Soon part of it peeped, a hot molten blot of orange glowing in the dark gray, not through the clouds but in the gaps between their smoky blackness.
Though we could see little of it through the clouds, we got a breathtaking sense of the strange illusion of its size. It seemed the size of an apple or grapefruit, and glowed a magnificent yellow-orange. Bloated but more luminous than baleful, the moon was for agonizing minutes on end mostly shrouded in black clouds jaggedly backlit with a ragged fringe of gold.
We desperately wanted to see the whole moon, but the color effect of yellow-orange and deep gray was gorgeous. I found myself making impatient lifting motions with my arms, as if lifting a tarp or a sash, I wanted so bad for the bank of dark cloud to lift above that gorgeous orange solstice moon.
“It looks like a sunset,” said the woman behind me with quiet awe, her young son on her shoulders.
Eventually it broke through the clouds. I have never in my life seen a moon so bright. My eyes swam trying to focus on it, and I found myself instinctively shielding my eyes — from the moon.
We missed the best viewing as by the time it had cleared the clouds and mountains it had been rising for a good 45 minutes, and was too high in the sky for the moon illusion, an optical illusion based in the moon being low on the horizon.
But what little we saw was unforgettable. And tonight, with the moon still mostly full, I think I will slink over to another observation spot and watch the show again.
So of course this isn’t really a month where nothing is happened. It’s just a month where everything happening is quiet and small, a molten suburban moon and an excited child on his mother’s shoulders being shushed. I have lain in bed listening to a mockingbird calling for his mate in the moonlight. I finished my first case study with my new corporate client. I knitted on the grassy college quad while listening to live Latin music. And this morning, as if the beauty of the solstice moon last night were not enough to recharge my spirit, I found this:
The year’s first blossom of my well-named Queen of the Night cactus, a night-flowering cactus that must have produced its strangely alien and lunar yellow-white florescence as the moon rose last night in solstitial splendour.
Sometimes this blog is quiet when there are no stories. When the are stories, it speaks up again.
Here’s some links to short animated clips from the first movie of the water-issues series I’m working on. Animations are from Robert Klein of Klein Digital, and they’re absolutely gorgeous.
Click on the images to see the clips.
Here’s an animation of my hometown of Asheville, with impervious, water-shedding surfaces shown in red:
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This is an animation of the terrible 2004 floods that hit a flood-plain neighborhood in my city, permanently destroying businesses, property and livelihoods. Total damage to the area was $200 million:
The same set of storms (the remnants of TWO hurricanes, Frances and Ivan, hovering over Asheville and raining for days on end) killed people in a freak mudslide in a nearby city.
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The image and link below are not video footage! This is a landscape flyover animation of the North Fork Reservoir, the local reservoir that serves my region’s water needs:
I grew up in the second-closest house close to this reservoir, so close I could see it from my porch. I’ve walked its shores and touched its waters. I gave someone directions to my old house yesterday: take the right fork, go until you come to a dirt road, pass the horse pasture on your left…
Now that I think about it, growing up by the North Fork Reservoir is a huge part of who I am.
More info on the animations here.
PS: Yes, this is a really fabulous internship opportunity.
ICE CREAM CUPCAKES.
(Image and recipe are from Joy the Baker via BoingBoing. Click her pic for more.)
This weekend my dear friends Katie and Laura got married at a campground as a man played a classic Stephin Merritt love song on the acoustic guitar.
I had helped Laura edit their wedding vows, and sat in a kind of quiet awe when she told me that sometimes she and Katie can’t get to sleep at night because they’re making each other laugh so hard, laying together in bed. She said she has to beg Katie to quit making her laugh because she has to get up early for work.
I guess that’s the kind of problem to have with one’s partner in life. (Note to self: Shoot for that.)
Wedding Highlights
1. Laura-bride’s father, when offered a pen to sign the couple’s wedding promise during the ceremony, shakes his head and will not take the pen I offer. Instead he moves to the side of where everyone is signing a promise to honor and support the marriage and takes a deep breath. Then he walks around behind me and stands in front of the table, silently reading the brides’ wedding promise.
I watch him nod his head. He picks up a pen and signs with one word:
Dad
2. Katie-bride’s father, who had said he was coming in for the ceremony only and leaving immediately afterward, stays on into the night, a beaming father of the bride seated like a tribal king on a Coleman camp chair, rising to cut a rug with his beautiful daughter on the bare earth under a tarp. It is at this moment as the bluegrass music plays that I realize that not only are things going to go better at this wedding than anyone ever expected, they are going to verge on the miraculous.
3. During the ceremony, Katie-bride is almost hysterical with joy, as if she cannot believe she actually gets to be the one that marries Laura. Her face is pink, her eyes are teary and shining with excitement, and she looks as if at any moment she will be propelled upwards from the earth by pink love-jets, do a few loop-de-loops in the air, and leave a pink vapor trail that smells like roses before drifting back to the ground. When asked to make her final wedding vow of loving Laura forever, she can’t speak, breaks down and has to have a hug from her maid of honor and her future wife before, with sudden calm, she can speak the words.
4. During the wedding toast, an old friend from college tells Laura-bride that Laura came out to her 11 years ago to the day. She still has the letter and reads from it, telling of Laura’s fear and uncertainty then. Then she tells Laura that today she has conquered her fear and with her wife by her side, together they are so strong. Laura-bride, who is not a weeper, breaks down in tears embracing her friend.
This was not a gay wedding.
This was a wedding.
Friends Katie and Laura are getting married today by the river they love and float down with me every summer.
I had wanted to camp out a night or two at the three-day campground wedding bash (150 guests from as far away as England), but gastritis has hit me again, making me not so much in pain as so weak that climbing up a flight of stairs is a minor ordeal and mowing the yard takes a good three-hour build-up of rest.
Yes, I will go to the doctor, but first I’ve got a wedding to go to.
Between being ill, busy with multiple projects and a screenwriting internship, catching up with housework and yardwork and helping out with the wedding (I made the brides a dry-mounted “wedding promise” for all 150 guests to sign; I’m also sort of in the wedding as the person manning the table where the promise gets signed), I’ve been not so much overwhelmed as just pleasantly whelmed, with zero free time but a full heart.
K&L didn’t plan their wedding during this weekend of equal marriage rights popping up in the news like spring dandelions; like any wedding involving international travel and 100+ guests, this one’s been in the works for more than a year. But the timing feels numinous as two people who just want to love each other and raise a family gather with their loved ones to do something that shouldn’t be any greater act of bravery or daring than any marriage already is.
When I had their wedding promise printed up, in the back of my mind was the fear that the printer would read the names of the brides, realize what was going on, and tell me to take my business elsewhere. But not only did this never happen, the printer gave me part of the order for free as a wedding gift, and gave my friends warm congratulations on their big day and his wishes for clear weather.
You should have seen the surprised happiness on the faces of the brides to learn that the printer sent them loving acceptance in the form of good wishes on their wedding day. Every bride should be loved by her community like that.
I remain ill and busy and tired, but while mowing the lawn this morning I wept in the grass as my friends’ wedding song (the Magnetic Fields’ exquisite “The Book of Love“) played in my mind and it hit me: Today is a very big day. Today is a day for the miracle of human love, as two people pledge to spend their whole lives together, to build a life and a family together that will go on for generations, to rely with the most profound intimacy on one another as long as life lasts.
Seeing as how it starts with a blowout campground party, a wedding, a good marriage and a real live screenwriting internship, I can’t help but think that this is going to be another great summer.
More soon once I am rested and well and done with a few of my current projects, and home from the wedding exhausted and sunburned, stuffed with catered food and stinking drunk on joy.
If you don’t read Alexandra Jones’ “The Ax Files” blog on sfbulldog.com, I’m here to ask you to start.
If you’re one of us, reading this will make you understand a lot of things about yourself and your kind.
I now consider myself to be completely unemployable in the usual sense of the word—appearing in a place, fulfilling a function, completing my duties, being graceful and cheerful and productive and responsible and coming back the next day at a time certain to repeat the routine. No, I won’t do it again. I love myself too much. I’m the only one who knows what it would cost me.
Read the whole thing here.
When I saw my friend Kate recently, she shared with me a simple, no-fry plantain recipe I was dying to try, especially since I had two ripening plantains on my kitchen counter, sitting on a tea towel, waiting to be devoured by the plantain-loving me.
I tried her recipe last night and it is SO worth sharing, not to mention ridiculously easy. NO deep-frying plantains in this recipe — you just bake them!
For those new to the plantain, it’s a starchy Caribbean fruit that looks like a large, ugly, overrripe banana. It has a firmer, meatier texture than a banana, and is commonly eaten cooked rather than raw. It’s sweet and delicious, kind of a comfort food.
Kate’s Baked Plantains
Wait until plantains are mostly dark brown-black and really ripe. Don’t worry if the skins show a little mold. The fruit is OK.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Peel plantains and slice them lengthwise.
Put them in a lightly greased baking pan. Drizzle with oil and salt generously. (The salt will cut the cloying sweetness of the plantain in a VERY delicious way.)
Bake for 10 minutes. Serve hot.
Eat as a snack or side dish, plain or with tomatillo salsa or the sweet or savory dipping sauce of your choice.
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You know, at least once this month I’ve wanted to write a long, lovely blog entry, and had something to write about, but didn’t have time. The semester ended on May 8 and I am still waiting for a breather.
I picked up a technical project on the 9th and a web project the following week. And I realized I needed to get cracking on the media internship I need to graduate, so I inquired at a local new media group, explaining my strengths and asking if they had anything I could work on this summer.
Things happened VERY fast and I got a summer screenwriting internship in barely a week. I’ve been working on a VERY cool animated science movie series for three days already.
The group likes my work so much that I am already being told there will be opportunities for me in the future, which I am delighted to hear, since frankly I have had a crush on this organization for years. I am part of a 9-member team and so far everyone I have worked with has been lovely, truly exceptionally encouraging, helpful, accepting, creative and easy to work with. I felt like part of the group from my first day. It’s like a dream, or at least it would be if I could just have a little break in it somewhere to catch my mental, physical and emotional breath after the end of the semester.
I’m also writing copy for a website about AIR CONDITIONERS (exciting), helping out with a wedding taking place on the 31st, knitting my first sweater and editing an 8-page case study. Not only am I still waiting for the breather I’ve needed and deserved since school let out, it’d be nice to wash my gross sinkful of dishes sometime this week, or to have some proper time to get ready for summer and my new summer mode of life (and get a pedicure).
It’d be nice to have a little time to write for myself, too. I miss the blog. Here’s to a nice rest soon, to give me some perspective on what just finished and what is beginning, and what the summer will hold. I have no complaints, save that I wish I had some time to think and plan and savor, and not just rush through what is undeniably a very fine start to the season.
My week:
8-page, 2000-word Microsoft case study
dinner and yarn sortie with the excellent KATE
beloved friend breaking up with boyfriend, terrible sadness
other beloved friend marrying — I am called upon for help writing the vows, great happiness
church function
pot luck at Laura’s (too tired)
breakfast with Laura 2X
lunch with Geniune (canceled)
other sleeve of first sweater done
started watching BSG season three
gastritis again, dammit
planning screenwriting internship with local new media company *
* more on that later
Looks like there might be a dual-hemisphere knitalong among me (representing the Northern Hemisphere) and Heather (guest-knitting from the Southern Hemisphere in Cochabamba, Bolivia) and our knitting friends and family this June. (A “knitalong,” BTW, is when a loosely connected group of people all work on knitting the same pattern in the same general timeframe.)
Anyone have any ideas for a project that is good for a fairly new knitter, fun to do in warm weather and only takes a month or so to complete? Leave a comment if you do!
Anyone can join in — just send email, leave a comment or check back in with the blog.
You MUST reside in either the Northern or Southern hemisphere to participate.
And this is the email I just sent her.
“Eightball” is my nickname for her husband, and the “internet cafe across the street” is in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where she is flying this Saturday, there to work as a health clinic volunteer for the next two months.
Hey you! A final word to say I hope you have an amazing two whole months in Bolivia! I will check in on Eightball and the dogs.
You are so brave to do this. I admire you so much. I can’t wait to hear your stories because I have a feeling they will inspire me to someday be as brave as you are already. I’m the one that needed a push; you were already plenty brave enough.
The next time you think of yourself as ordinary or insignificant, imagine yourself flying into Bolivia by yourself for two months, not yet fluent in the language, never having been there before, armed only with chick lit and a deck of Blue Ridge Parkway playing cards.
What will I do without my knitting buddy for two months? (We should have a knit-a-long, and knit the same thing together on two different continents!)
You are amazing. I hope you have the time of your life.
Email me when you can from the internet cafe across the street!
“Let us risk the wildest places/Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.”
- Mary Oliver
Here is Heather’s new blog (it’s also in my sidebar), Chicken Lips. Expect posts and pics from Bolivia soon.
I turned in my last final today, a little late because I had sorely underestimated how much more work it still needed. A quick vet for clarity had turned into a partial rewrite. I raced to the college and across the lawns and landscaping to good old Zageir, home of the Poli Sci People.
“Can I turn in my exam seven minutes late?” I asked Dr. Sabo, who was hanging out in his office with a student.
“I won’t look at my watch!” he said. He thanked me as I walked away.
While the horrid stereotype of the hyperliberal blowhard in love with his/her own opinions and intellectual prowess is alive and well in higher education, that kind of professor is the minority. I find that the vast majority of college professors (at least the ones I encounter as someone who is picky about her professors) are intelligent and helpful people driven by a desire to impart information they find exciting, powerful and useful. The best teachers combine helpfulness and nerdiness *, two of the qualities I cherish and admiore most in the world.
* which I define as the quality of taking deep pleasure in working towards expertise in an academic area; the technical cousin is geekiness
Anyway.
I walked back to my car under the hot springtime sun, through the grass and past the brilliant orange of the flame azaleas and over the dusty drifts of oak pollen. As I started up the hill to the commuter parking lot, it hit me.
“Oh my god. I’m done,” I said.
Then I kept walking on into my day.
The lovely feeling of finishing is a bit diminished when you come right off of finals into work and a week-long technical project. I’m hoping it’s really just delayed, and sometime next week I will realize that this semester is done and gone, done and gone. No more lectures, papers, tests or quizzes for at least a month, more if I skip summer school.
Back to work. Someone please pass the peace of mind and feelings of significant intellectual accomplishment.
I took my Media, Ethics and Society exam this morning at 11:30 and I think I did just fine.
Then I spent an hour brushing up the eight-page take-home final exam for my International Law class, printed it out, walked across the grassy quad to the Zageir building where the poli sci people live, and slipped it under Dr. Gibney’s door.
Then I drove over to Rosie’s and we sat on her fine front porch. Her BF Greg told us about the developing lineup for this summer’s Laugh Your Asheville Off comedy festival, and I got invited to the boozy blast that is Greg’s 30th birthday party this Saturday. BYOB, pot luck and camping.
We sat in the sun on a perfect spring day, the nearly cloudless blue-and-gold-green kind that tempts you with a coming summer that feels like it’s already here in all its sweaty splendor.
God I love the South.
I drove to my local polling place and voted — really voted, my primary presidential pick actually matters this time! As always, I saw my five-star nerd of a former calculus professor. He volunteers like clockwork to work at the polls for every election because he is as civic-minded and political as they come. (He still remains, without a doubt, the person mentioned most often in this blog. Do you remember those days?)
I drove home and waved to my neighbor, out walking her dachsund in the sun. Now a quick lunch of cottage cheese and lentil soup, and back to the work of finals and freelancing.
Exams left: One take-home, one in class tomorrow.
Days left in the spring 2008 semester: TWO.
Got a candidate you strongly support? Consider volunteering in your own neighborhood handing out campaign material. I find it’s a strangely fun and effective way to be closer to the people and places in your neighborhood, as well as give more than just your vote to a candidate you believe in.
I’m writing this grassroots guide to neighborhood outreach efforts literally just after walking in the door from volunteering for Cecil Bothwell, a friend and county commissioner candidate.
I just spent the afternoon walking around green and lovely Best Asheville on a perfect and breezy spring day. I smelled the odor of stargazer lilies on the wind. I heard the rustle of a high wind through hundred-year old neighborhood trees, when the air around me was still but the treetops danced. I noted how startling and pleasing the rich gold-green of an arborvitae is next to a hot pink azalea in riotous bloom.
I peeked in the front door of a house filled with people just getting ready to start an acoustic Sunday night jam.
It wasn’t just neighborhood activism I did today. It was meeting my neighbors and learning more about my neighborhood. In past efforts I’ve met George, a retired WWII veteran with yappy dogs and a little garden plot of ornamental gourds — on my mantel I still have the one he gave me. This time around, I met tattooed Daniel and his tiny toy chihuahua, Edie, who is so small he has to sit with her outside so no neighborhood hawk flies off with her.
Edie, he said, weighs about 2 1/2 pounds, about 1/3 the weight of my smallest cat (who is indeed very small, even for a cat).
I also met Margie, another retiree, and her half-wild Maine Coon cat whom she says would just as soon bite you as be nice to you, but she cares for him anyway.
Just based on a few fine afternoons of putting out info and meeting neighbors, here are my guidelines on neighborhood activism and how to deepen your roots in the place where you are planted — all in the name of volunteering for the candidate of your choice:
- Volunteer on your street and in your neighborhood.
- Bring water, sunglasses and some Scotch tape to tape material to doors where the screen door handle won’t hold door-hangers.
- Walk facing traffic and cross streets carefully. Don’t walk in the middle of the road just because you’re in a residential area.
- It’s OK to go alone. If you meet someone and talk to them, it’s less like you’re ganging up on them. I think I look less scary and more open to neighborly conversation when it’s just me.
- Beware of bad scripts, even from PACs you like enough to volunteer for. If I see someone in the yard or on the front porch of a home on my list, I never ask who they are voting for or try to push my candidate.
- Be respectful of property and don’t walk through grassy yards when there’s a walk or pathway through the grass.
- In hot weather, time your effort to avoid the worst of the day’s heat. Early evening is perfect in springtime. So is anytime that’s a good time for a good long daylight walk around the neighborhood.
- Pre-plan your route so you know the best, shortest route to do what you need to get done. Walking around the neighborhood in the hot sun putting out door-hangers is surprisingly tiring, and can take a few hours.
- Wait until just a few days before election day to hand out material. Most people don’t vote early but on the day-of, so having your information fresh in voters’ minds is probably, IMO, better than putting out door-hangers two weeks before election day, when people are less likely to have the election in mind.
I just ask if they want any information on whatever race my candidate is in and if they do, hand my material over. I figure I’m more likely to persuade someone by being a neighborly person who pets your dog and is glad to meet you than trying to sell you on my beliefs. If I’m being conflated with my candidate, I’d prefer to be remembered as friendly and polite, not pushy. You’re buying into a candidate, not me, though I welcome the chance to give you some cues about the choice I’ve made in the race.
I never expected to enjoy neighborhood volunteerism as much as I do. It seems the houses around my house actually have people in them, who have stories and hopes and hobbies and pets and interests just like I do. I was surprised to find that political volunteering in the neighborhood was a great way to meet the people at the other end of the street that you don’t know, even though you drive my their homes twice a day and live your life a two-minute walk away. I feel more connected to my neighborhood now. I better understand what I was part of all along.
I’ve met my neighbors this way, seen some lovely homes and gardens, gotten some great landscaping ideas and petted some cute cats and dogs. I’ve had fun, gotten fresh air and exercise, and felt not only civic-minded and like I contributed something valuable to my vision of what’s right for my community and country, but also, unexpectedly, became closer to the people and places of my own neighborhood. (A vote’s such a little thing. Neighborhood outreach is a good way to increase not only your contribution, but your power as a change agent.)
I view both halves of the experience as equally valuable.
If you ever go on a political walkabout in your own neighborhood, let me know if your experience is as pleasant and rewarding as mine.
The last regular day of the semester was Tuesday and here I am, listening to Napster (test-driving a freak folk compilation called Folk Off) and getting ready to start a day of website writing and take-home exams. And coloring my prematurely graying hair, now showing close to an inch of silvery roots.
I can’t help but think it isn’t just the passsing of ordinary time but the passing (in more than one sense) of five long and taxing years of adult study that seems to have significantly altered my black-to-silver ratio. From what I can see of the roots, I seem to be working on salt-and-pepper temples and an honest-to-god silver streak just left of the center of my forehead.
My favorite thing anyone ever said about the late thirties is from my friend Randee (constantly mentioned here in the blog) who calls that time of life the old age of childhood.
Which is just how it feels from behind the wheel.
I can feel some real blog entries blooming inside me like flowers, but for today, with take-home final exams to work on, websites to write and evening plans, I’ll keep it simple with some ordinary life updates.
*******
Anyone else tried the new Google desktop? I like it so far, and love my weather updates that I set to include not only Asheville weather but temps and humidity in Chennai, Denpasar (Bali), Port Said (Egypt), Kuala Lumpur and brave Heather’s destination in barely a week from today, Cochabamba, Bolivia.
I love comparing the weather from all over the world!
Denpasar and KL are humid as hell (to this native of the famously clement mountain environs of Western North Carolina) and Chennai is hot as a biscuit. Cochabamba, meanwhile, is in the same time zone as WNC and also in the highlands, and has very similar temperature and weather to Asheville, though so far it seems to be more humid.
Right now in parts of Denpasar it’s storming, 76 degrees F and 98% humidity… Chennai is 90 degrees F at about 9:30 at night.
*******
I’m nearly done with Season 3 of Lost. LOVE it! (Minor spoilers ahead.)
It’s wonderfully cast with a very talented group of actors largely perfect for the role they play, and while the dialogue can be embarrassing at times, the overall story arc is extremely compelling, with an achingly expert slow reveal.
For the entire first year, the show is just about surviving on the island, with some very weird intimations that this is no ordinary tropical paradise. Season Two is spent slowly approaching a real encounter with the mysterious Others. Season Three (my favorite), where it all could have fallen apart, is about some answers at last about who the Others really are and what’s really going on on the island.
I can understand viewer problems with the tangled plot, but it just seems to me that the writers are merely employing the writerly trick of never giving the viewer an answer without posing another question. Crumb by crumb through the story arc. Apparently co-creator J.J. Abrams is big on creating mystery, on leaving questions unanswered and working the viewer’s mind into a froth of suspense.
You know how endings are never as good as the heady race of the thick of the plot? (No ending ever can be. I can count on one hand the books I’ve read that followed a breathless middle with a deeply satisfying ending. Something about human brains love the middle, and are never satisfied with the end.) Abrams exploits that human way of processing information, making you chase after him, begging for answers, always wanting more.
The refreshing and praiseworthy surprise of Season 3 is that the Others are as compelling as the original castaways, and their addition just makes the show that much richer and better. Plus the show constantly explores the main characters’ backstory, so Lost really happens on three levels, all of which work: the castaways in the present, the Others in the present, and everybody’s backstories (of which Locke’s is the most consistently compelling IMO — a great role, great writing, great actor, well-deserved Emmys all around).
Lost is great, and I am bummed I’m nearly done with the Season 3 discs.
On to Eddie Izzard and The Riches!
*******
Since I started knitting I am much more comfortable taking in a movie in the evening, which used to feel a little like a selfish waste of time. No matter how educational my DVD of choice, sitting still and doing nothing productive for two hours always made me feel guilty, even as I recognized my right to (and need for) a little daily rest and relaxation.
But now that I knit, that feeling is banished, for any movie is an opportunity to multi-task. My typical evening now includes either Lost or a documentary/Frontline DVD and a knitting project, and I sit and rest and take in stories and information without guilt.
And after a few years of knitting, I am at last making my first sweater. I picked Jared Flood’s lovely cobblestone sweater in an alpaca blend in a muted blue/green/brown.
(image from Flood’s website, Brooklyn Tweed)
It’s for a friend’s birthday and it’s coming right along, with the first sleeve 90% done. Now that I attempt what I always thought of as the Knitter’s Pinnacle, the sweater, I see that a relatively simple and unfussy sweater like this is actually easier than a lot of things I have already made.
Lace hats are smaller and faster but harder, as are socks, which are fiddly and require things like toe shaping, reinforced heels, short rows, kitchener stitch…all manner of greater challenges than the endless simple stockinette stitch of the typical sweater like this.
As I am a TV knitter, I welcome the simplicity of the pattern. And as I am a profoundly practical person, I welcome the usefulness of the everyday garment that is a good woolen sweater. I hope birthday boy will like it — it is a lovely color, a good soft wool and a handsome pattern.
*******
The rest of my month has included so far a leaky toilet, a fixed toilet that began leaking again in an unrelated way, a busted water pipe, a $130 water bill (for a household of one), tons and tons of homecooked Indian food, homemade double-chocolate raspberry muffins (I think I came within a hair of making them TOO chocolately; I had to eat a lot of them to be sure), and a gorgeous Appalachian spring that is this year completely untouched by frost.
My Japanese maple made it through last year’s freak 17-degree hard April frost at spring’s vulnerable and emergent peak, and has made a complete comeback though it lost all its limbs (it’s growing new ones!). As is more usual this time of year, the days are warm and pleasant, the nights are cool and restorative, and the earth is afire with green, green, green. What a world.
Pics of the garden and the sweater to come, and even some real blog entries, as my life decompresses out of college mode and I briefly become an ordinary freelance writer again.
Number of regular class days left in the semester: three
Number of five-page final term papers due before then: one
Number of quizzes this week: four
Number of expensive Sigg steel thermoses lost this week: one
Number of take-home exams to finish this week: one (International Mass Communication)
Number of take-home exams to finish next week: two (American Politics, International Law)
Number of in-class exams to take next week: two (Latin I; Media, Ethics and Society)
Number of credit hours I have left until graduation with a B.A. Mass Comm and Poli Sci minor: 41(three full-time semesters)
Minimum credit hours it takes to receive an undergraduate degree: 120
Number of times I have made North Indian lentil soup in the last week: three
Day of last exam (official end of spring semester 2008): May 8
I cooked up another fine North Indian meal for lunch; homemade chutney is my new obsession. If you are in the market for a new recipe, leave a comment and I will send you an amazing spicy North Indian vegetarian lentil soup recipe that takes zero prep and is ready in about 40 minutes. It’s my new favorite soup EVER — even the cookbook author (Madhur Jaffrey) says she eats this a few times a week, it’s so simple and delicious.
The sole drawback is it really needs red lentils (not the regular U.S. grocery store kind) and it doesn’t hurt to have some ghee and asafoetida on hand (though you can skip and substitute, and red lentils are the only thing that may require an extra trip).
(Not my soup — someone else’s. Mine’s good though!)
I was thinking to myself how utterly full of life this song is, so I wasn’t surprised to note that it’s from the album Songs in the Key of Life (great name for a blog, that).
Below are lyrics since they’re not really clear in this song.
Looking back on when I
was a little nappy-headed boy
then my only worry
was for Christmas what would be my toy
even though we sometimes
would not get a thing
we were happy with the
joy the day would bring
sneaking out the back door
to hang out with those hoodlum friends of mine
greeted at the back door
with “boy, thought I told you not to go outside”
tryin’ your best to bring the
water to your eyes
thinkin’ it might stop her
from whoopin’ your behind
I wish those days could come back once more
why did those days ever have to go
I wish those days could come back once more
why did those days ever have to go
cause I love them so
Brother says he’s tellin’
’bout you playin’ doctor with that girl
just don’t tell and I’ll give you
anything you want in this whole wide world
Mama gives you money for Sunday school
you trade yours for candy after church is through
smokin’ cigarettes and writing something nasty on the wall (you nasty boy)
teacher sends you to the principal’s office down the hall
you grow up and learn that kinda thing ain’t right
but while you were doin’ it it sure felt outta sight
I wish those days could come back once more
why did those days ever have to go
I wish those days could come back once more
why did those days ever have to go
After a much-needed three-week break from blogging, I’m back.
While I was away, I learned a few things:
It’s silly to keep up a blog, but leave your offline friends in the cold as to who you are lately and what you are up to.
Latin: Challenging, even for nerds.
Fifteen credit hours is for working students who are waitpeople, not working students with brain-intensive technical jobs. And different people need different levels of downtime. Respect.
So next semester I’m paring things down and trying to keep myself to 9-11 credit hours a semester, looking to spend a little less brainpower and a little more time knitting, cooking and spending time with friends. I’m like a broken record, aren’t I, with the obvious lessons that lie heavily in the hopper of my mind, waiting for me to learn.
The other day I watched a game of Pirate vs. Ninja Capture the Flag on the college quad (thank heaven for college kids). As I watched I overheard a late-20s college anarchist talk about playing 100-member anarchist urban capture the flag in Bloomington, IN. (They enlisted drunk yuppies in bars to shamble around scouting out the opposing team’s flag zone.)
As I observed to my friend Laura the other day, anarchists seem, no matter their age, to have stayed in touch with the things most people I know thought were important when they were teens (and even now seem to know are still important, but nowadays the first things to ignore): having fun, resting, dreaming, talking, reading, thinking, helping people, enjoying real leisure and pleasure without the worrisome pangs of “adult” guilt.
But is it “adult” to call any of those things less important than making money, being on time, being a professional, having prestige or a certain reputation, having the material markers of success or your own personal vision of a home or personal aesthetic, even when it involves significant expense?
I used to feel that mathematics had the medicine I needed: pure logic, spatial sense. Now I think maybe anarchists have it. Playing, resting, helping, thinking.
Anyway. I’m overdoing it this semester with the 15 credit hours and the financially rewarding but very demanding and technical new freelance client. I don’t know how much blogging will be going on in April, but I’ve decided to simply write when and what I feel called to. Another thing I thought about during my break was Why blog? Why should I be so foolish as to think my life is worth listening to?
But it’s in thinking that my life is not worth listening to that I am foolish. I love to read Wil’s book recs, Erik’s cat-care adventures, Kate’s trials… I even love to offer Michelle advice about what not to do with a teenage daughter. In short, people are interesting, even and perhaps especially people with blogs. People’s stories are wonderful.
Mine continue, starting now.
Last night the strangely lightened sky clued me in that the full moon, the first of the new season we have all waited all year for, is here. (Which makes this Sunday an early Easter that sneaked up on me completely.)
I thought of myself sitting in my office in the dark, looking out the window at my fine view of my slice of world (where right now the cherry trees are starting their magnificent pink storm of blossoms), listening to music under the first full moon of spring.
I hope you’ll turn off all the lights by a moonlit window and join me if you can.
“Pearls Dropping Onto the Jade Plate,” Anna Guo
I think this blog is taking a brief break.
See you April 1!
Exams.
Migraines.
Burnout.
Walking around the campus with your fly open while wearing orange undies.
I’m in the middle of midterms. Nonetheless I’ll be back:
Spring break starts tomorrow and the semester is half done!
I was meme-tagged recently by my friend Wil:
It’s pretty straightforward (but not necessarily easy): Write your biography in six words. Include an image of yourself if you’d like.
I can meme that meme in six seconds flat:
Happiness in several thousand difficult lessons.
I’m not a tagger, but this is a fun, easy meme (IMO) — leave a comment if you like!
My excellent pal Laura is throwing me a birthday party on the afternoon of Sunday, March 9. If you want to come and say hey and eat some cake, leave a comment and I will give you details!
What: Jennifer Saylor’s 39th birthday party
When: Sunday March 9 at 4 p.m.
Bring a friend and your favorite board game!
PING-PONG
CAKE AND BOOZE
CONVERSATION
GOOD TIMES
(Image: Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, AKA the Yarn Harlot)
As Valentine’s Day approaches, I’d like to revisit this 2007 post by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, the Canadian knit-blogger and grade-A knitting author known as the Yarn Harlot.
As her blog commonly gets hundreds of comments for some entries (and she once singlehandedly lead an online effort among knitters resulting in a quarter-million dollar donation to Doctors Without Borders), I figure her readership must be in the tens of thousands. This is because as well as an outstanding knitter, she’s also a wise parent (two teenaged girls) and a highly intelligent wordsmith with a well-developed moral center and a lot to say.
I loved her entry last year about twinkie love vs. whole wheat love. I think I’ll repost it every year at this time.
Having a day where the romantic performance of your mate and whether or not he or she gets you a card, flowers and chocolate (although I do like all of those things) is paramount takes the focus off of real love and real issues between mates….job sharing, equal education, support, loyalty…and who the hell is making dinner tonight and are both of your names on the mortgage anyway?
Shared work, equal education, mutual support, loyalty and individual, independent financial power. I agree wholeheartedly that these are the unfrilly, unpink, fully clothed foundations of real and lasting love, at least of the sort I’d be interested in.
Read the whole thing here on her site.
It’s Friday. Can you guess what jack move I plan to be down with tonight?
1. Getting all whacked on “Scooby snacks”; doing crimes
2. just search YouTube this weekend under “Asheville orgy copywriters”
3. Latin homework
I came across this breezily and by accident today while doing my Int’l Comm homework.
American fashion director/photographer Scott Schuman takes pictures of people on the street whose style he finds interesting, and posts them to his blog, The Sartorialist. I was curious, but thought the snaps would be dreary and pretentious.
They weren’t. This blog is strangely sweet, charming and fun, and what it celebrates are taste, style and individuality.
All ages are represented, from this absolutely classic Parisian teen:
To this grande Milanese dame:
Here’s a dapper gent:
And her, I love:
More at my new daily read, The Sartorialist.
(Attention conservation notice: While it’s finally slowly wearing off, I found the movie Sunshine disturbing in the extreme. This is blog entry as exorcism.)
Danny Boyle’s Sunshine is the most harrowing movie I have ever seen.
The rest of this blog entry contains major spoilers.
I heard this song on the radio today.
It’s over 25 years old and has only become more relevant (and disturbing) since its release. You can’t say that about every song that came out in 1982.
I make my living off the evening news
just give me something, something I can use
people love it when you lose
they love dirty laundrywell I coulda been an actor
but I wound up here
I just have to look good, I don’t have to be clear
come and whisper in my ear
give us dirty laundrykick ‘em when they’re up
kick ‘em when they’re down
kick ‘em when they’re up
kick ‘em when they’re down
kick ‘em when they’re up
kick ‘em when they’re down
kick ‘em when they’re up
kick ‘em all aroundwe got the bubble-headed bleach-blonde who
comes on at five
she can tell you ’bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye
it’s interesting when people die
give us dirty laundrycan we film the operation?
is the head dead yet?
you know the boys in the newsroom got a running bet
get the widow on the set
we need dirty laundryyou don’t really need to find out what’s going on
you don’t really want to know just how far it’s gone
just leave well enough alone
eat your dirty laundrykick ‘em when they’re up
kick ‘em when they’re down
kick ‘em when they’re up
kick ‘em when they’re down
kick ‘em when they’re up
kick ‘em when they’re down
kick ‘em when they’re stiff
kick ‘em all arounddirty little secrets
dirty little lies
we got our dirty little fingers in everybody’s pie
we love to cut you down to size
we love dirty laundrywe can do the innuendo
we can dance and sing
when it’s said and done we haven’t told you a thing
we all know that crap is king
give us dirty laundry
This blog officially welcomes Megan Rose, shown below with her mom, new-minted British flood expert Cal W. of The Occasional Purl. Cal says she is not entirely sure if her new daughter counts as a Finished Object or a Work in Progress. </internet knitting joke>
Welcome Megan! I consider her one more person to be delighted to see when I finally make it to Derbyshire.
(I will bring my own transportation, in light of recent events.)
(UNCA magic snowflake that indicates the college is closed.)
The snow came last night at around 9:30.
I was sitting and knitting a hat in the living room and watching Waking Ned Devine, which is an absolutely lovely, funny comedy with an outstanding Roald Dahl moment at the end.
A car drove past the house on my quiet residential road, and in its headlights as they went briefly and brightly by in the darkness, I could see it — snow falling thick and fast.
I paused the movie, dressed up warm, and went out into the darkness to look. Sure enough, I could feel it falling on me immediately, see it illuminated in the streetlight by my neighbor’s house. I stuck out my tongue and felt it swiftly dusted with snowflakes.
I ran back inside for the laser pointer, which makes beautiful shapes in rain or snow, the more and faster the precipitation the better, lighting up the drops or flakes that fall into its beam in a long, dancing conga line of illuminated rubies. (Laser pointers don’t show a beam of visible light, but do project a fat dot of red light a quarter of a mile or more, and will illuminate anything in their path, including raindrops and snowflakes.)
I came in cold and delighted, and sat back down for my excellent movie, with the deep, deep heart-peace the childless, self-employed working student knows when there is absolutely no need to set the alarm tonight or get in the car tomorrow.
With thickly falling snow at night, there’ll be no school. It will be that best of things for the busy person, a day devoted to rest and catching up.
Today I’ll catch up on my Latin and poli sci homework, track down the last of my textbooks, final-edit some web copy for a client, balance my checkbook, pay bills, wash the sink full of dirty dishes, clean the cat box, maybe figure out how to work the juicer that’s sat dormant in my cabinet for a few years. By all means be jealous of my fine day at home, but don’t forget the full package includes student loan debt, exhaustion and chronic overwork.
Just not today. Not today.
Today I may shop for yarn if the store is open and the roads allow, fill the birdfeeders and watch the mother and child set of neighbors sled down the hills of their back yard on yellow plastic saucers.
We got a proper blanket last night, looks like maybe 2-3 inches.
*******
I’d like some college advice. Feel free to share whatever wisdom you possess:
I’ve signed up for a political science class, International Law, which I thought sounded interesting. But it turns out the class is full of pre-law students, uses a $90 law textbook, and is very law and treaty-oriented. Not very interesting after all.
But it works with my schedule, fulfills a minor requirement, and the professor is well-reviewed and very funny. The class requires about 30-40 pages of reading every weekday, but has few tests and mostly consists of understanding the readings (legal precedents from a fat hardcover that is big and expensive as only legal and medical texts can be) and discussing them in class.
The subject matter interests me very little, and I dread dragging my feet to learn case law that doesn’t attach well to any significant interest of mine (I tend to to enjoy the economic and governmental aspects of poli sci over than the cultural or legal aspects).
I’ve got today to decide to keep the class or reinvent my schedule.
Any advice?
*******
In happy news, though no one told me it seems that I am on the 2007 UNCA fall semester Dean’s List, an honor awarded to full-time students with a semester GPA of 3.5-3.9. Sort of like the A-B honor roll (though not the A honor roll) for college students.
*******
Errata: I got the facts wrong from my recent rushed phone call from Rowan in which she conveyed her excitement over the possibility of driving around Ireland this summer doing research. She’s only just been invited by her professor to write the grant, and was calling me to tell me about the exciting possibility of doing such amazing cool and interesting research.
Her grant hasn’t been approved yet, and she’ll be writing it this year for travel and research in August.
Heather’s grant, meanwhile, is pretty much a done deal, though not quite. She’s been asked to supply more information, and expects to have her grant approved after a data entry ordeal.
Wish them luck. I am still gunning to drive the van in Ireland, and have offered free writing assistance to Rose and Heather both.
big bag of peanut butter-dipped pretzels from Greenlife: $5
pen-style laser pointer for playing light-games in the sky with falling snow: $10
Netflix subscription that lands Waking Ned Devine in your mailbox on the night of a snowfall: $15
knowing deep in your heart that snow days are even better when you are nearly 39:
priceless
I know my wishes and felicitations are late, but I spent most of the week hammering out a last-minute project for a client who needed web copy for his website client, a company that sells golf carts.
I am now a minor expert on EZ-GO/TXT and Yamaha golf carts. Please, hold your applause and calm down.
You KNOW, the reason that I don’t post much about my bread and butter work here is that it’s not that interesting to write about, much less do. At times.
Nothing against golf carts. But a very high boredom threshhold and the inclination to work where the money is can get a girl pretty far in the writing profession, where people will frequently give you cachet you hardly merit just for being a writer, not to mention good pay for writing jobs too unromantic for the cafe crowd.
I’m taking it easy today after my golf cart marathon.
One thing I want to do over what remains of winter break, as well as cleaning and dusting my office and washing the cat pee out of the hammock I stored for the winter, perhaps foolishly, on the basement floor, is to spend a day trying to dig up an email contact who writes nonfiction nature and science screenplays for television.
I’ve devoted so much energy to school for so long, I’d like this to be the year that the two halves of my life begin balancing out.
Anyway. Here are my New Year’s wishes and goals for 2008:
Goals
1. Have my windows washed
2. Find a television screenwriter, nonfiction flavor, who will email with me
3. Do a regular physical activity that reduces stress: yoga, meditation, walking, biofeedback
4. Find a good housemate
5. Gather a group of interested people and start looking for a place to start a cohousing community: go to meetings about alternative housing and land ownership and attend the 2008 National Cohousing Conference
6. Get a passport already!
7. fix the skylight of doom (I wish I had a font that dripped blood for this one)
8. Sing at Jubilee and explore finding a singing gig
(I think I rather prefer goals you can cross off rather than nebulous resolutions you’ll blow off by mid-January.)
Two bloggers posted creative “resolutions” I loved. This one, from Walt Whitman via Blue Gal, I just can’t get out of my head:
Someone else (I can no longer remember who) wanted to live by Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata, for which I cannot blame them (click to enlarge):
Wishes
I wish Michelle a healthy and beautiful baby girl.
I wish Don and the Makovinettes fun and incredible good times in their new home.
I wish Erik lucrative and fulfilling creative work.
I wish Pyracantha a year full of art.
I wish Anne a fulfilling semester.
I wish Kate sanity, rest and help.
I wish Wil would post more like this one. Wow. Excuse me while I go to the library.
I wish Cal would post more about her beautiful new arrival, whom this blog has been waiting to officially welcome.
For the third and last time, I wish everyone a happy, sexy, creative, musical, fulfilling, artistic, connected, rewarding, grand, successful and succulent new year.
Here’s to making it count.
I had to drive to the bank this morning to make a deposit. On a sunny day with barely an inch of snow on the ground, I lost control of the car twice.
The first was the worst, when I came within a whisker of plowing into a passing car. My car slid on an icy patch and I lost steering and braking while meanwhile nightmarishly heading right for the car trying to pass me and desperately driving onto the edge of someone’s lawn to avoid me.
If the driver hadn’t been able to swerve into a yard to avoid me, I would have sideswiped his car and damaged both cars. White car driver, I am so sorry! I was coming right at you but doing all I could to brake and steer away… Thank you for the sharp driving.
Minutes after that I slid again but lucked out onto a bare patch, melted by the morning sun, that let me brake, regain control of the car and turn left for home.
I limped home, a little breathless.
This is what it is like driving in the South sometimes, and for all the craziness involving long lines at the grocery store as overreacting Ashevilleans line up for milk, bread and eggs, today I realized the grain of danger present in any snowstorm in a place where snow melts into a layer of ice.
I’m glad to be home.
BTW the main roads I drove on are not bad at all (wet with brown slush), but the neighborhood roads are icy and dangerous. Drive slow, stay in your lane and if you don’t have to make a run to the bank, stay home.
Winter storm warning? What winter storm warning? Yesterday dawned cold but sunny. Bright and crisp.
Snowplows placed themselves strategically around the city while the Asheville blogerati shrugged off the warning and went about their business. I wrote, cooked and baked all day