Words

I don't know if I've always felt this way but I am far more comfortable communicating via writing than I am through speaking. Words are versatile and beautiful. They give you distance which can translate into perspective and function as ladders to climb between thoughts or probe deeper into them. Words give you time to frame a coherent reply or express yourself more succinctly and eloquently than anything you could call up on the spot in the moment. 

Sometimes a whole sentence can pass through my mind with no meaning extracted from it. Instead, I listen to its cadence. Some sentence are metaphors for stories, with an introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, end. But they're not just meaning--they're sound too, sound as expressed by the mental voice reading in your head. And some sentences can have a sound to them that are metaphors for songs. Certain words fit better than others; certain phrases end a paragraph with exhilarated sigh, not with a bang but with a profound reverberation of meaning and sheer sound: 

"...for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Buendia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."

Words can make chills go down your spine. The agreed upon patterns of letters can convey enough information to elicit a physical reaction from your body. 

Poetry--good poetry--is a miracle. Spoken word makes me hold my breath without even realizing it, exhaling only with that ringing silence that comes after the final word, the final chord, before people raise their hands and break its almost physical presence with the sound of applause. I love that moment and if it's a good one, it raises the hairs on my neck. 

Lyrics to songs dazzle me. They straddle two worlds. They put meaning on top of meaning, layering semantics over the meaning found in music itself, creating a palimpsest. A climactic melody supports the words that go along with it--just listen to any Disney song where the hero/heroine finds their way. But instrumental music can express plot just as well as sung words and sometimes even better. It can express the unspeakable. Put the two together and what do you get? Words that detract from song? Song that distracts from words? Or something created between the two that adds up to more than either.

I find it hundreds of times easier to communicate by writing things out but I accept that not everyone feels that way. And sometimes I wonder if resorting to writing is putting distance not only for perspective but also for safety--as if by writing we can edit ourselves and experiences to a safe, unemotional hands-length away. I don't know the answer to that. But there is something beautiful in arranging and perceiving words, something beautiful and critical that may not be sufficient for the human condition but which I believe is pretty damn near necessary for it. 

Beep Beep

Hello there :) It's been awhile. I don't even know if anyone reads this anymore but for once in my life I'm going to not analyze why I'm doing this or who my audience is or anything meta like that. I miss writing my thoughts out on here because it forces me to produce roughly eloquent sentences instead of conveying my thoughts in run-on ones that don't come to a significant point. 

What have I been up to? On the surface, not too much. I've been working at University Book Store as a seasonal temp. They pay very little but at least it's something and at least I'm suffering. That may sound weird but it's one of the reasons I wanted to get a job like that. I've never really had to clock in, clock out, eat my lunch/dinner in 30 minutes, and remain unflaggingly cheerful to people I don't know at all. As someone who's fascinated by people in general, retail's a great way to just observe. People begin to blend together, except for the ones that stand out for some reason: the impeccably made up older Southern lady who locked her keys in her car and had to wait in the store for almost an hour, talking too loudly into her cell phone and calling me "dear." The short Spanish man who basically taught me about the fancy pens or at least let me kindly fumble my way into learning about them while helping him out. The old German man named Klaus who needed University seals, or was it paperweights, and he was sure someone at the store showed it to him before and what kind of name is Connie? There are those kinds of customers but mostly everyone starts to look the same and sometimes you embarrass yourself saying hello again to someone who just walked by. 

I like that though. To know that people are more similar than we think. To see people buying gifts for their nieces and nephews and grandchildren in Florida, California, Colorado, knowing that each personal niece, nephew, grandchild is unique but the experience of caring for someone far away can be repeated so many times amongst unknowing strangers. I don't know any of these people (except for Peter, my old Neuroscience professor who bought something one day) and I don't really care about any of these people but in a benign, distant half-senile avuncular way I wish them all well. 

There's a lot I disagree with when it comes to retail and the tip of consumerism iceberg it represents. But I'm learning so much too. I would never want to work in retail forever but I'm glad I'm having this experience, despite not wanting to go into work on Sunday...or any day really. I call it suffering because sometimes it is so mind-numbingly boring for eight long, tedious hours on your feet but maybe that's too strong of a word. I mean unpleasant. I mean soul dullingly boring. I mean painful. That's what life is, having to be able to endure such adjectives. I like all my coworkers at least and it's teaching me to be more confident with strangers. 

Other than that I've been trying to be more creative, reading good books, cooking things, and going outside. Here are some pictures. I've been walking and running in Owen Woods and Garner Park. The trees are in Owen, on a breathtakingly cloudy, cool day in which the vastness of the sky hung over the prairie and the trees stood out like bones. I LOVE weather like that. Standing on the hill looking out in the distance with my cheeks chilled, slightly out of breath from hiking upwards, is so profoundly real and unadulterated it makes me feel wild.

 On the right is the beautiful award-winning bird shelter on Garner Park, designed by Stuart William Gallagher. What a incredible sight! I'd just come from rambling around in the little forest bordering Garner (lost the path a few times and had to climb over some fallen trees) then came out and went up the hill to this view. It's so proud, all clean lines and open sky. It was really cold that day but the sun was shining. This was the day after the Owen picture so the contrast of cloud and sun was amazing. 

And these are garlands Kelly and I made at the library yesterday for craft night. My camera failed me on this but the clouds were cut out of old books using a die-cut press thing. The book pages had been unsuccessfully tie-dyed in a previous project but I thought it looked interesting. I cut the raindrops out of blue cloth scraps and all the pieces were sewn together on a sewing machine. 








I've also been trying to figure out what I want to do in the future, which has necessitated asking some big questions and then asking them again. I'm not sure about a lot of things but I do know you can only move forward. In that case, I've also been trying to become better at keeping in touch with the people who matter and letting go of those who might not have a good influence. I'm trying to believe in myself no matter the path that I take or the choices I make, and letting myself inhabit all that I'm worth. It's not easy but every day feels meaningful at least.

The Post-Facebook World

Well, my own little world, not the larger one. Here are my observations on no longer having a facebook:

-It's harder to get in contact with people. A couple of times now I've thought of people who I'd like to contact but don't have a means to get ahold of other than through facebook. People who are in that watery grey area between acquaintances and friends, or even people who are solidly in the acquaintance ring, can fall through the cracks because you can't reach them. Most of these types of frienquaintances aren't in your phone or email address list. Facebook allows you to connect with those types and without Facebook, short of creepily showing up where they work, it's kind of impossible to get in touch.
The Flip Side: It makes those people you do get in touch with--and stay in touch with--more meaningful. It reveals how far you're willing to go in order to reach someone. It makes those connections more authentic. I fully understand the merits and necessity of casting a large social net but I think I'll always be someone who assigns more value to relationships that require some tangible effort to meet up or talk.

-It's easy to feel alone. Because face it (or maybe Facebook it, ha ha), there's some degree of connection in scrolling through a friend's pictures or reading their status posts. I really do miss seeing pictures of those I care about on Facebook.
The Flip Side: It's easy to feel alone on Facebook too. At least for me. And after awhile, scrolling through 67 pictures posted by your friend to a recent album just gets bland. Habituation, that inescapable affect-leveler, just comes in and rolls all over your interest. Seriously, if someday a pill were invented to prevent habituation, suddenly relationships and even mundane tasks would be completely revolutionized.

-It's harder to talk to people. This isn't quite the same as staying in contact with people. I'm talking about Facebook chat, mostly. Since Facebook has become the social media website of everyone's choice, most of real-time talking takes place on Facebook--since everyone's already on it all the time. That means there's less people on Gmail and...well, Gmail.
The Flip Side: Not sure if there's a really clear Flip Side to this one, since it would be nice to chat with more people. Perhaps it's just the whole existential crisis of short-term chatting versus having a real conversation in person. But that's the same Flip Side as the first one. So, jury's out on this one.

-It's harder to do group things. Facebook's event tool does make it a lot easier to initiate group events and sometimes people forget the person who's off of Facebook or it takes more effort to get ahold of that person.
The Flip Side: Um? I like Facebook events. All I can think of is that Facebook events never really accurately reflects who's attending and who's not. There's like a built-in Facebook Event Factor of Adjustment for every Yes, I'm attending that also accounts for the more-likely Maybes.

-Your information is yours. Granted, your information's being made NOT yours in many other ways just simply being on the internet. Furthermore, all the information that was once on your Facebook is still out there, somewhere, and accessible. But the abstract part of me does take satisfaction in the thought that my info isn't being sold to companies through Facebook, that auto-played video ads won't show up in my newsfeed (for all y'all who use fb on your smartphones), that I am not being mined like a fat vein of binary ore. At least through Facebook, currently.
The Flip Side: It's happening through everything else on the internet.

All in all, I personally still think that the benefits of not having a Facebook outweigh the costs. There are days when I really want to log on and see faces, hear news; those are the days my friends meet Connie Who Needs A Facebook Fix. But after I'm done scrolling through a few minutes of information, I'm happy that by closing the website/app and handing the phone back to my friend, I've returned to Facebooklessland.

Onward

It's coming to that time of year again. I love listening to crickets chirping in the cool night, nights cool enough for blankets. Fall is always such a nostalgic time for me, bittersweet yet exciting from enough years of school beginnings to evoke a conditioned response: things ending, plants dying, CLASSES!!
Only this year is different. There aren't any classes, or any beginnings, to look forward to. I really should've done more job searching/life figuring out/anything really earlier this summer. But no matter, it's too late to agonize over it so all I can do is send out my applications now and recognize that all things pass. We make our way through all moments.

I'm looking forward to going out west. Hopefully Scott won't be road-tripped out because I intend to properly do the whole thing: Glacier, maybe Banff, Olympic National Park if I can finagle it. Mountains! Forests! Oceans! Part of me has been longing to see mountains for so damn long. I remember flying to San Francisco and looking down over the Rockies, thrusting out of the ground like the bones of the Earth. Ribs for our world. Even diminished by airplane distance they were formidable, texture in an otherwise textureless view. From a plane textures get lost but patterns get highlighted--that's why flying over farmland is so interesting. I love looking at the patchwork quilt of farms in Wisconsin separated by strips of forest. Every now and then there are circles in the fabric from weird circular irrigation sprayers.

Anyway, that'll be my view flying back, which is something I have been avoiding imagining. I'm generally pretty good at holding my emotions back in public but I'm worried I won't do so well this time.

Looking forward into the future terrifies me. The idea of not knowing makes me uncomfortable. But if you think about it, there are so many things we can't know. I was talking to a friend about the future, specifically about how far down the future we should cast our minds. I think that while planning for big things is very important after a certain point it becomes counterproductive to think about what point B will look like or how we'll get there. That one quote by that one guy with Maria in his name (Rainier Maria Rilke and the poem is this) keeps coming to mind lately. It's a lovely sentiment and one that I'm slowly, slowly trying to meld with a voice in my head (that sounds a lot like my mother) saying "you must find an appropriate goal and act accordingly to achieve that goal in your life BE IN SCHOOL." Who knows? I've been told that I'm idealistic and rigid in applying those ideals. Maybe that's true because it seems to me that if you choose one school of thought you can't subscribe to another one--if you are a Wanderer Liver Into Answers (ha, liver) then you can't be a Planner Straight To Grad Schooler. But maybe life is a patchwork of schools of thought and I just don't know how to sew them all together yet.

A lot of my friends are going away, going abroad. I've been pretty happy not having a facebook these months but I miss staying in touch over that. It's easier particularly because a lot of my friends don't use gmail or gchat anymore. There's something to be sad for short but more frequent communications of the sort that facebook enables. But I don't want facebook to be giving me video ads or selling my newsfeed rights to companies. I know that google and a plethora of other online entities already do that but I can't opt out of google, realistically. I don't know. We'll see.

I'm really looking forward to Scott coming home. But tomorrow, Devil's Lake with a geophysicist!! That'll be fucking awesome.

Foodsicles

Lentil Recipe

Do not use any measuring utensils. Freemeasure!

I made this tonight for us to eat and it was veery eazy. It was tasty too, especially with the plain yogurt I just made yesterday. The recipe originally called for leeks but instead I substituted it with chives and celery.

Ingredients:

2 stalks of celery
A bunch of chives. They are weeds in our garden!
2 cloves of garlic
some cumin
some salt
some black pepper
Lentils (half a bag is what I used)

1. In a separate bowl or pot, rinse lentils then soak them so there's just a bit of water covering them.

2. Mince garlic and chop up the celery and chives.

3. Add a generous amount of olive oil to a pot (a Dutch oven/ceramic pot is what the recipe called for and we happened to have one from the Asian grocery store so I used it but I'm sure a steel pot would work fine) and saute the celery and chives briefly, until the celery begins to look a little translucent on the outside and the chives are soft. Then, add the garlic and saute until garlic smell is wafting everywhere.

3. Add cumin, salt, black pepper. The original recipe called for 1 1/2 tsp cumin and then I stopped paying any attention at all so I don't know how much salt and pepper was supposed to be added. Stay on the side of too little cumin rather than too much, otherwise it will be bitter like a thrice divorced man. Oh, and the recipe actually wanted cayenne but I didn't have that so I substituted black pepper instead. Be generous with the pepper.

4. Drain lentils and add to the pot with celery, chives, spices. Add in water (here's where it pays off to measure I guess, because my lentils were a little watery) to however many cups of lentils you originally used. There are directions on the bag usually. Otherwise, just freemeasure and take chances, make mistakes, get messy! Ms. Frizzle, anyone?

5. Add salt and a bay leaf* then let it all simmer for however long it takes until the lentils soften.

6. Optionally, as you taste it while it cooks, add lemon juice if you want some piquancy. Kelly didn't like it with the lemon juice so it's really just to taste but I thought it was much better when I squeezed some in.

7. Eat! Alone, with rice, with yogurt, with bread.

*I'm convinced this does nothing but placebo the shit out of the dish, kind of like that stone in stone soup

While I'm at it, I might as well put the CRAZY EASY yogurt recipe up.

Yogurt

You will need:
A half gallon of milk (i use 2% because whole is too much and skim is nasty ass)
2-3 Tbsp starter yogurt, plain is better
A food thermometer


1. Put yo milk in a pot. Turn the stove on to medium heat and slowly heat the milk up, stirring gently to avoid milk depositing on the bottom of the pot as a film. You want the milk to reach 185 degrees.

2. Fill your sink with cold water. Once the milk has reached approx 185 deg, immerse the pot in the cold water and cool the milk until 120 deg.

3. Once it has reached that temperature, take out the pot and whisk in your 2-3 Tbsp of starter yogurt. Can be store bought, I got the kind with low fat not no fat. I also wasn't too careful when measuring. The key is to thoroughly incorporate the yogurt into your milk, although even that I didn't do too meticulously. Huh. Apparently do whatever you want and it works.

4. After you've added the starter yogurt, pour the warm milk+yogurt mixture into jars. Doesn't really matter if you use Ball canning jars all legitimate like or a giant clean pickle jar. Just seal it.

5. Turn on your oven light and place the jars of yogurt in there for 10-11 hours. The longer you keep them there the thicker the yogurt will be, supposedly.

6. EAT ON EVERYTHING

Click click

I don't know how common this is but sometimes I find myself doing an emotional turtle/snail/hermit crab and take perverse satisfaction out of the fact that I'm sealing myself hermetically into this little shell. It's really comfortable, and I like it in here thank you very much. Keep Out. Since this can't only be a melodramatic post about metaphorical shells I will include a picture of Costa Rica at sunset.

Which has the added benefit of kicking mopiness in the ass and reminding me that there are inherently beautiful things in the world that can't be exhausted. Someday soon I will make a post about Costa Rica but today I'm just gonna clean some more, read some more, make a to do list, and go to bed.

Totally Normal

I've been stopping to smell almost every single lilac tree I can physically approach. White ones, purple ones, pink ones, almost-blue ones. Sometimes I smell some that aren't actually lilacs, which are then either equally good smelling or really, really stinky--life's a crapshoot! Smelling all these makes me feel strangely wealthy, like I'm rich in scents. Also, how lucky we are that pollinators like smells that humans appreciate too; otherwise, maybe every flower, not just some, would smell like corpses.

These were pictures that I took when I volunteered at the Arb yesterday (was it really yesterday? seems oddly long ago). I love volunteering there, though it has been almost too beautiful to be true the past two times. I love being out under the blue sky, hot sun, and occasional red-tailed hawk. Red-tailed hawks are huge!! They are actually like the size of a small sedan. For mice. There's a pair of red-tailed hawks who have a nest in a grove of pine trees near the Native Plant Garden, which is where I work. When I was little, that pine tree grove always reminded me of Bridge to Terabitha, that part where Leslie (is that her name? Or was that his name?) pretends she is a queen of a kingdom and the pine grove is the sacred place. 

It really is kind of awe-inspiring under there. And the pine forests up north even more so.

Anyway, the first day I volunteered I scared a nest of baby rabbits whereupon one ran away and got snatched up by the hawk. WHOOSH. I almost peed myself in excitement. Actually, I was dehydrated, but I would've if I could've. It felt perfectly right for the hawk to catch that rabbit, despite my admittedly non-natural interference (I wasn't actively trying to feed the hawk, I was pulling weeds and scared them out from ten feet away). The hawk took the rabbit up to a tree, plucked out its fur and probably some skin, then took it back to its nest to feed baby hawks. Hawklings. Stephen Hawkling har har. It was so right and oddly beautiful. Then I picked up a queen bumblebee. The takeaway message was: we miss so much of what we're looking at. I hope to look up and around and down a bit more, engaging all my senses, so I don't pick up the weird buzzing clump of grass or put my hand literally two inches from a baby rabbit and startle both of us nearly equally. So I see the muskrat in the water (I did! On my walk, which I will talk about in a moment), the oriole in the tree, the bug on my bed, the person in front of me. The beauty all around.

I went on a run this afternoon but it was so lovely later in the evening that I had to get out of the apartment. I went down for a walk along the lake, which was perfectly calm and perfectly stinky at times. Walking helped and on the way back a breeze dissipated the smell somewhat. The sky looked like:
<------THAT. That that that. Birds were doing their evening chorus (I heard a robin that sounded unbelievably pretty, I always thought robins would speak in fat, British voices). Voices from people in the park having fun floated over and several fishermen were out standing enjoying the evening. I saw one catch a bluegill! Almost went over to ask him if that's what it was but then I figured he probably wanted the peace and quiet of the evening so I would respect that. It's nice to enjoy someone else's enjoyment. I saw Grandmother Muskrat, or at least one of her many iterations, which stupidly made me overjoyed and almost feel like it was a good luck omen for the rest of my life.



Which, admittedly, has some rough bits in it. It's so hard to look forward without looking back and regretting the past. I know it's not proactive and it's too late to change anything now, but applying for medical schools makes me realize how much I didn't do right through college; that's just the plain fact of it. It's hard to face the fact that you may believe yourself to have qualities you want to show to the world and bring to the world, that make the meeting better for both, but it's nearly impossible to even get introduced. So that's one thing I've been struggling with. It's so important to keep going forward. There's also the whole what's going to happen to me and Scott when the summer's over thing, a big Thing which despite my best efforts continues to sit in my mind like an obnoxious elephant taking a dump. I think is coming out to color all of our interactions, the way I see us, and everything important. Sometimes I honestly don't know anything at all. 

But the only thing to do is keep on keeping on. Which I only just recently learned were lyrics from a Bob Dylan song. Actually, that's not right. I don't intend to keep on keeping on, because applying the same exact actions to life wouldn't change anything. I intend to keep on changing...on. Changing on? Remembering things that were once important to me (my god I was the most monumental nerd on the face of this earth providing, of course, those other earths that were terraformed by SPACE WARRIORS didn't have humans, duhhhhhhh), like reading lots of books including story books. Or hardcore doodling. Or...whatever. Remembering those as well as finding new things and refining, focusing in, on other old things like why exactly I want to go into medicine and working my ass off for it. To end with neither a bang, nor a whimper, but a cliche (so maybe a whimper)--life is just too fucking short. 

Amen.