I was walking across a bridge when I took this picture.  I’d been lost in downtown Tacoma, and it was probably the calmest lost I’ve ever been.  I had a good parking spot.  It was cold but the sun was out.  I entered a bookstore and started looking around, sizing up patrons, deciding who looked best to tell me where I was.  I zeroed in on an older man.  He had to explain twice how to dog leg around a brick building and find the Chihuly bridge.

26Jan11

I think if Lucy could hear me yelling, “I’m coming, HOUND,” on my way home each day, it would bring her comfort.

Verbose expounding on the status quo from ten years ago leaves the taste of gun metal in my mouth.  The constant mediocrity is numbing.

We know that command and control is the most cumbersome and expensive way to do something for the environment.  Market incentives, of course; voluntary regulations, great.  What the coalition of states in the Northeast and states like California are doing is fantastic, necessary, and right.  But it’s not enough to make even a dent in the amount of GHG emissions the US is pouring into the atmosphere on a daily basis.  It’s insulting to hear someone that spent 8 years in the Department of Interior discuss reforestation efforts in South America.  Just so long as not one American’s right to fuck up the environment in far away places is compromised.  What type of catastrophic event will have to occur in order for some Top-down regulations to come from the government regarding GHG emissions?  Or rather, how many catastrophic events?  The most powerful piece of legislature we have to protect the environment is the ESA; command and control.

The only interesting piece of info Lynn Scarlett seemingly picked up from her decade-long career in the government is that one should engage with the public in decision making.  Talk to the people that live in an area and realize they have some knowledge inherent in the systems they live within and manage.  It’s kind of analogous to the requirements for a geography degree in times of yore.  (If you were going to study a geographic region, you had to commit to living there for 12 – 24 months, and couldn’t graduate without being fluent in at least one other language, preferably the language of the place you were studying.)  Little does she know that considering community members as stakeholders hasn’t been a revolutionary idea for over a decade.  And expounding in the most verbose way possible on the importance of dialogues and preferences does nothing to change the status quo.

Cut the science-type , academic, this-is-how-things-are jokes.  I appreciate that you are coming into your own spiritual place; make that your best contribution.  People can learn your politics from a memoir; shift gears.  Indeed, catastrophic environmental disasters aren’t funny.  Ask the people who suffered in Hurricane Katrina, which peripherally introduces the reality that the poorest people suffer in the face of catastrophe.  And there’s nothing funny about a dumbed-down nation of people who are having their most intimate relationships in life with a screen.  Citizenship in a country does not a stakeholder make.  Stakeholders are people who interact with their environment and communities and have a stake in how they are changing and what will be there for generations to come.

If the average person doesn’t understand the science behind climate change (he/she doesn’t), then the people who do understand need to be working with government officials to draft regulations that will shift momentum into the direction of mitigation and conservation and precaution.  This is why we elect people.  We can’t just sit on our laurels until the next catastrophe happens.  Which always brings me back to Halina Brown, who said so simply and profoundly, It only takes a few major disasters for people to figure things out.

Everything is so rigid and stifled in the middle of a concrete maze with no air flow, no non-human life forms, no connection visually, audibly, or tactilely to the natural world.  No one pushes the envelope or says radical things without the envelope of cynicism and jest.  No one knows how to, except maybe the ones that have moved on and are looking out windows, but even that’s speculation.

Insight comes from clearly seeing that something is transforming, mutable.  It comes from true interest, an almost wonderment, or delving into something deeply until it is seen that it is not fixed.  Then you can participate.

If life revolves around anything it’s music and poetry.  And no time is this better than the holidays.  People love and loathe the holidays because they allow us to express parts of ourselves that lie dormant for so much of the year.  They allow us to tease each other and comment about each others’ lives on levels not realized in other months.  It’s almost like people are too polite in April or November, or they’re too polite in the south in general, but if you venture to the north around Christmas, the going gets good and believe me it’s worth it to hear what you will; it’s pure love.  Consider it; consider making it happen even though your brain and will and situation and, fuck, all of life as it is really can’t join the pieces together to make whole as A Charlie Brown Christmas plays in the background.

Don’t you know sarcasm when you hear it?

I don’t understand how a chunk of ice holds together for that long, leaving its comb of light like a whistled song.

I love the people that dare me to be happy.  I love the deep life force.  We’re all in this together.

How many times can you seemingly turn your life upside-down in the name of true love?

How long are you willing to be alone to do just that?

And I’m not talking about settling for a good relationship because that might be easy.  We can all find a decent relationship and move on with our lives.  I’m talking about that fairy tale shit that doesn’t exist for longer than some time but might be true.  The true of the nuts about.  The true of the magic.

118

It seems as if my life revolves around discipline and patience these days.  I wake up in a foggy haze with the most prominent expression of movement in my mind being, don’t move.  There is no chipper welcoming of the day or bouncing out of bed to grab coffee and begin what needs to be done. Maybe I’m becoming depressed.  I took a weekend away from working.  All the way up until Sunday night at 7pm.  And I want another solid month.  I took a month off when I returned from Africa.  I’ve been working again for 3 months and I want another month off.  I can’t tell if getting a PhD is unusually stressful (or if I’m in a particularly stressful stage of mine), or if I hate what I’m doing.  There are a lot of thoughts that surface regularly that this is not the right path for me.  But I’m fixed solid, it feels, in the middle of a situation I would have to completely upend in order to change it.  Maybe a lot of people feel that way about their lives at some point.  Maybe there are times in each person’s life when getting out of bed in the morning becomes an exercise in discipline, and discipline is what’s available to live in a life that feels too complicated.  Maybe patience and acceptance are all we have to get to the next lighter place.

Snippet this.

One of my favorite bloggers, hmmm maybe she’s a former blogger now, said when posting less, “There’s nothing I have to say that I can’t say in 140 characters or less.”  And so she uses twitter and facebook, and I like both of those sites well enough I suppose but they lack a lot of the camaraderie the true blog offered us when we were all using it on a regular basis.  For me, if I had to pinpoint why I hate facebook most (there are probably 1,983 reasons) is that it’s training my brain to think in 2-sentence snippets.

• Bob Dylan tonight! I hope he plays All Along the Watchtower!

• Every morning six eyes gaze up at me looking for kibble.

• Everyone loves cold weather after 6 months of sweltering sun… I’ll still be smiling and embracing my sweaters come January.

And so forth, and so on, and something is getting lost or used up in the brain’s organizing words, spitting out 140 character witticisms.  A lot of which are just plain boring.  Although I, personally, love knowing what people eat any time of day, such is my love of food.

So why are we splitting our lives up into these miniscule sound bytes?  They’re like catchphrases for an advertisement or the punchline to a joke.

The best part about blogging for me is crafting a post that connects ideas and images through paragraphs of past, present, or future, and relates to the bigger picture or at least gives enough explanation to paint a picture of a moment, day, experience, week.

I went back to my old blog and randomly typed in June 3, 2006 to see what would pop up.  This is what I found…  the beginning of travel posts from my first trip to France:

going backwards to day 1

I flew out of Miami.
To get there I used a one-way car rental. It was cheaper than I thought it would be. And much cheaper than driving Annie and paying to park her. I drive like a bat out of hell in a rental car.
Until I hit a Florida blackout downpour. Then I slow down.

People here often look at me with wonder when I tell them I am perfectly comfortable driving in 12 feet of snow blizzard whiteout conditions at midnight. The rains here are another story. They are like driving in a wading pool while a dump truck pours water constantly on your windshield. Drive in that. Your wipers shrug their shoulders and move at their own speed.

I experienced this in central Florida. I’d like to say where but it all looks the same from the Turnpike. I started to get nervous about catching my flight. I took a deep breath. These days I’m successfully not getting my underwear wrapped around the axle about things I can’t control. It rained all the way to the airport though thankfully not to that extent.

I stopped at a Turnpike plaza close to Miami to fill the rental car with gas. Do you know that their “fuel service charge” is upwards of $6.80 a gallon these days?
I pulled in to an open pump and started to fill. The nozzle kept clicking off and I only got about 3 dollars in the tank before the side of the hoze split open and soaked my thigh in gasoline.
It was a *this-cannot-be-happening* moment.

I pulled up to the next pump and filled my tank. I headed into the service plaza past Starbucks into the women’s room. I sighed the sigh of acceptance, removed my pants, and started to soak them under a sink. Strangers look confused when they enter a Turnpike bathroom and see a twentysomething in her underwear soaking her pants in a sink.

Unfortunately the smell of gasoline doesn’t wash out. I believe it needs to dissipate.
I reached the airport to check in for my 9.5 hour flight soaking wet and smelling like automobile fuel.
Grand.

I boarded the plane to find an individually wrapped fleece blanket and pillow on my seat. I was sitting next to an African man (if I had to guess – over time I realized I didn’t know which language he was speaking to his travelling partners though he spoke french and english to me). He was quite lovely and reminded me of a colleague of mine from graduate school. He didn’t seem to mind the smell of Lead-free 87. Though intermittently a waff of it would reach my nose and I would grimmace.

It would be 9:30 AM when we landed at Charles de Gaulle and I slept as much as I could on the flight. My legs woke me up to walk around. I ate some sketchy airplane food. They played two or three movies. I don’t remember which ones.

When we started to land people started to wake up and open their window panels. Light flooded the cabin and I peered over an aisle to see that we were descending into countryside. It was rolling hills of green grasses, some flowering. Rolling hills of green. Surrounding an airport. I started to tear up realizing that I was finally out of the United States.

We landed and exited the plane on the runway. We were led to a shuttle bus and brought to the airport. I went through customs, found the baggage area for my flight, picked up my pack, and headed through the ‘Rien déclarer’ line into the airport. At this point I needed to buy a phone card. I love that there are still pay phones all over in Paris; they haven’t been eliminated by the cell phones. I walked up to a magazine stand to use my french for the first time. I asked the woman if she had a telephone card. She said yes and asked me if I wanted it for international use or use in France. I responded use in France. She sold it to me. Success.

I found a payphone and figured out how to use the card. I called Jennifer and told here I was on my way. I asked an employee of the airport, which bus goes to Gare Montparnasse? I found the bus, confirmed that it was going to my destination, and asked the driver for a ticket. I chose a window seat to view the city from and sat proudly with my communication abilities. It was about an hour and a half to the train station.

I wish I could say I remember much about the drive in but I was really wiped from my flight. I was staring at buildings and cars and green space. It was spring there and everything was blooming. I saw a sign for a George Michael concert and thought, so you have to live in Europe to see George Michael in concert. Lucky bastards. The man sitting next to me started asking me questions in French. I stared at him trying to pull words out of his sentences and put them back together in my mind to understand what he was saying. He started speaking in English when I didn’t respond immediately. Is this my first time in Paris? Yes. What am I here for – and he gave me four options – work, studies, a man, or vacation? Vacation. He said he lived half his life in New York City and half his life in Paris. He was a businessman. I didn’t like him well enough to prod anymore.

I got to the train station, called Jennifer to let her know I’d arrived, and walked out to our meeting place – a carrousel. There are carrousels all over France. I must have seen half a dozen of them or more in my two weeks there. I sat on the grass next to it and waited. About twenty minutes later I thought maybe I wasn’t visible and then realized that I was less than 20 feet from the carrousel with an enormous Lowe Alpine backpack. If someone was looking for me at the carrousel, they would find me. I moved closer to it and sat on some steps 5 feet away another twenty minutes later. I looked at my watch and realized that I had been waiting for a little over an hour and thought, She isn’t coming. No, she will come. She would not leave me at a train station in a city I don’t know after 24 hours of travel. She will come. What if she doesn’t come? If she doesn’t come I will pull out my map and I will get on one of those trains and go somewhere. Somewhere that looks cool and has alcohol.

She came. We had lunch and she took me to her flat. I had four or five hours to kill until she returned from work. I just needed to stay awake. I rid myself of my 24 hour old clothes and washed the gasoline pants again in her sink. I took a long, hot shower. I dried my hair and put on lip gloss. I e-mailed my mom to let her know I’d made it. I started to peruse the internet but abandoned reading almost immediately because it was making me drowsy.

Jennifer came home and we went out for an apertif. This is what you have in France before a meal to whet your appetite. It is a drink of some sort and they bring peanuts. We ordered champagne with liquor in it – kier royale, I believe. It was very good. I sat on the street sipping my champagne and watching clouds roll by above a park. Another kier royale later and I needed to use the toilet. I had to ask the counterwoman for a token and Jennifer didn’t know the french word for token. This started a conversation with the man sitting at the table next to us. I went to the bathroom.

When I returned, the man who knew the word for token and Jennifer were in full conversation. We ended up getting pushed away by the brasserie closing and the rain. His name was Jerome. He lived in the 16th arrondisement also and commuted out of the city into a business district somewhere to sell insurance. He asked us if we would accompany him to another bar. We agreed. At first I was interested in trying to communicate with him but his english was as good as my french. That coupled with Jennifer’s loquaciousness left me on the outside of a conversation I didn’t understand.

I think they were talking about politics and McDonalds. Or World War II. Or both. It didn’t matter. The conversation drowned into the background by a cold rain picking up speed and pummelling the pavement. Taxis splashed through puddles and pedestrians ran under umbrellas. I thought, here’s to my first night in France; I made it. I took out my journal and started to write,
I am sitting on the street listening to American music from an overhead speaker where the traffic and rain beats drown out the sound…

I met my goal of staying up all day. I fell into bed and didn’t wake until morning.
___________________________________________________________

And there were 12 people that had been reading my blogs for at least a year that made thoughtful comments to that post.  Was blogging fashionable in the early 2000′s?

What happened to the art of crafting a real story?  I miss it.  And I miss it when my brain used to think in multiple paragraph format, connecting idea to idea that could then be crafted through guileful language and vivid imagery into something more than,”Thursday night – Grey’s Anatomy style… “making” myself dinner and watching Greys in sweats on the couch!:)”  Sigh.

Lastly, I really don’t need updates from people as they are doing everything.  “Going to Pizza Hut to see how many meat toppings they have!”  “Damn I’m sweaty after that workout, ooh la la!”  “Tomorrow’s a new day, mother fucker!  There are a lot of fish in the sea!!!”

I want my brain back.  The one that writes poems and declarations, the one that writes short stories and recounts epic rendezvous.

112

I love cold weather.  (and feeling cold, and snow, and bundling up.)  55 degrees outside and sleeping with the windows open is a good start.

We’re all so oppressed by heat in Florida for the vast majority of months that when it does break, everyone is cheering and happy and spending time outdoors.  It’s the exact opposite of living up north in a climate with brutal winters where people rejoice for the summer sunshine.  Here we beg for respite.

That seems to be a rather common theme in my life lately… begging for respite.  Taking one day away from working over the weekend put me in a tough position to work 12-hour days all week long.  I’d like one day to stay in my pajamas in bed with my kitties and dog.  A weekday.  Then it really feels indulgent.

My dog thinks she’s a cat.  She prefers cat toys.  She climbs up on the back of the chair I sit in often and curls around the back of my neck to rest.  She stares out the windows.  She tries to get in the top of the cat tree.  She loves litter boxes.  She goes under my bed.  She loves my cats.  She definitely wants to become one of them.

and the emails beckon.  i wanted to work from home today.  ahhh well.

108

I probably could have learned by now that sitting in my front yard, drinking beer, and watching a hipster party get broken up by a cop isn’t the best preparation for a weekend filled with homework.  Maybe some part of my subconscious was rebelling against the all-work weekend.  Fair to say at this point that the late night has kept my motivation level low today.  It was worth it, really, though because I  saw more fixed-gear bikes and American Apparel than I ever knew possible.  And maybe some people hooked up to create future hipsters like these…  http://imgur.com/gallery/a1xBE

I got a massage this morning.  Bliss.

BF is in Austin, TX at frisbee regionals for the weekend.  I have two hounds now, which makes being productive at home kind of a funny joke.  I want to take a nap.  I think if I take my reading material for Monday to bed with me I can pretend I’m trying to study

I need a support group where I can sit around with other people who also think they are making far more sacrifices than it’s worth to get a PhD.

105

0-0]… love, lucy.  (my dog loves to lie her head on the keyboard of my laptop and look up at me with sweet, droopy hound eyes.)  she has such good energy.

lately my brain is thinking and making decisions at a greater capacity than it is used to or probably should even with ample amounts of caffeine and 6-7 hrs sleep a night. i’ve read all manner of things that say a person can live on 6-7 hrs of sleep a night, or 8 hrs, or 9, 5, what have you.  but i think that really depends on what the person is doing during their waking hours and i can’t help but wonder if they control for that in their tests.  i gotta believe someone like michael phelps needs more (or less) sleep than i do based on his physical regimen, and 6 weeks into my 2nd year of PhD-ness, 6-7 hours following a 14 hour workday seems a bit meager.

i found my brother on twitter yesterday. since he’s the spokesperson for harry reid, he quit facebook, and i couldn’t find his email in my contacts.  so i googled and googled and found him on twitter, wished him a happy birthday all that was nice.  for some reason my siblings getting older makes me feel older than my own birthdays.  no idea why, but my brother turning 36 makes me feel older than when i turn 32 in a little over 2 months.  i’ve been confused that i’m 32 for a few months now, so it will be nice to not make mistakes when i’m thinking about my age

within my department i work on a huge project with a lot of funding and, like, 27 other people.  there are a billion reasons why people on the project don’t like the size of it, but i don’t mind so much save for the underlying competitive energy from the students to claim their territory and pick the coolest aspect of the project to work on.  i so happened upon the project cuz i wanted to study human influence on land change in an ecosystem where that was significant and hopefully rapid.  of course working in africa seems exciting and cool, and after a 2.5 hour meeting with my adviser yesterday, i’m left wondering how i ended up committed to working in an african savanna where the greatest influence is precipitation and the most important species are wildlife.  i should be doing forest studies in the pacific northwest.  i don’t know.  this process is so confusing and when I have to make long lists daily just to make sure i don’t forget something, it’s hard to carve out time to sit down and really think about what i’m doing and what i want to be doing.  i did all that before i came to grad school…  for months and months… and i guess i’ll revisit my statement of purpose because i swear it’s all in there and i can’t figure out how i got off track.  and i might not be.  too busy to understand.

my sweet sweet hound gets up in the early morning and rolls on her back cuz she likes her chest and belly rubbed.  she makes the funniest noises and soaks in the lovins until she bounds to the door to go outside.  she follows me around the apartment and goes to sleep in my lap if i’m sitting down and on my feet if i’m standing somewhere for a good amount of time.  she makes rounds through the living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom with her nose combing the floor like an aardvark, looking for anything to eat.  she’s tried to eat a bar of soap.  she’ll eat fuzz from the bathroom carpet.  her favorite delicacy is cat poop.

she’s got heartworms and i’m afraid the only way to solve this problem is to put her through a really hard treatment involving an arsenic compound and 1 month of forced rest.  it’s going to be hard on us all and it is expensive.  it breaks my heart, but she’s such a love hound.  i can’t sit and watch her die.  sometimes getting a dog before departing to africa for 3 months can cost you $800 in treatments.  but there is no telling that she wouldn’t have needed this had i stayed and religiously given her heartguard myself.  i learned a huge lesson about leaving the country for so long and the hugeness of daily responsibility my life has that i had to hand over to other people.  it’s a huge gift for someone to take on even part of that responsibility and keep it in order for 3 months.  it makes me think about couples where one partner is abroad for months and the other takes care of the house, pets, kids, life.  there’s a lot of devotion there.  a lot of commitment.

nothing profound here this morning, but i miss blogging so i’m going to make an effort to do it a couple times a week even it it’s just stream of consciousness drivel.  i suppose the practice itself will evolve better writing naturally.105

having everything

what an interesting exercise to purge my apartment and clear clutter after a summer in Africa.  i’ll typically go through this ritual in autumn and spring.  i’m going through all my clothes, trying things on, determining what i haven’t worn in a long time, what doesn’t look good anymore, thinking i have no pants, shorts, or skirts that fit.  all top, no bottoms.  and as much as it was for mental satisfaction, it was also out of necessity.  without reorganizing the closet in my dining room, i literally do not have enough space in my (very large) bedroom closet or dresser to keep all my clothes in.  it brings peace of mind to have organized space.

i’m blown away by how much stuff i own.  this fact has made me speechless and spun my mind into a whirlwind of clothing, jewelry, furniture, shoes, food, kitchen supplies, knick knacks, electronics, sporting goods, books, gadgets, perfumes and pets.  and i think somehow i collected all this stuff in part because either 1. i don’t feel good about myself and i thought buying all this stuff would make me feel better about myself 2. i don’t feel good about myself and i bought all this stuff to ignore that 3. i don’t feel good about myself and i thought if i bought all these things i could improve myself 4. some of it i just liked 5. all of the above.

what’s further interesting is that having all of this stuff around me hasn’t changed any of my basic insecurities.  and that desire to continue to accumulate things is just spinning in circles and perpetuating itself – it is going nowhere.

some of the things i have are really worthwhile, my boyfriend and our pets, and in some perverse way my mind thinks the accumulation of all the other stuff helped me get them.

which is a ridiculous sentence because i don’t actually own any of this shit, especially the people and animals i love so dearly.

a lot of the people i saw in africa were trying to get as many things as possible…  of course they want food, and they work to build the best houses they can live in; they want comfort.  but they’re getting in the mode of obtaining things, and even people who couldn’t afford food were most always spending big chunks of money on cell phones. all the young kids were into clothes and shoes and accessories and electronics.

and i think they were, in part, doing that because they think if they have all of these things they will find love and security, and build a life for themselves that they want to live in.

so i’m walking down the street tonight with my love and our two beautiful dogs.  i can see the leaves in the trees gently shaking in a breeze that was all too welcome after a hot day.  looking at us you can probably tell we have homes with what we need inside and cars outside.  we have pets that offer us unconditional love every single day.  we have found each other.  it’s everything.

i should stop this post right there because that’s where it deserves to stop, it’s the most important part of the story, and i’m afraid if i don’t stop it there i’m somehow going to fuck all this up and lose everything my mind has tricked me into thinking i’ve obtained.

truth being that somewhere inside, even though i have surrounded myself with more than one person could possibly need, and even though my life is deserving only of gratitude, i don’t feel like i am good enough.  beautiful enough.  feminine enough.  sexy enough.  smart enough.  funny enough.  wise enough.  and maybe that’s why i have accumulated what’s more than enough, because i feel like i’m not.

the wisdom of the day

Expectations ruin relationships.