I found an injured squirrel on my way back from work today. Its leg was broken, and it dragged itself across the sidewalk to avoid me. I couldn’t bring myself to leave it, so I called my brother at work so that he could find numbers for various animal rescue facilities. After many frantic calls, including one 911 call, and finally getting ahold of the Fish and Wildlife Services — just as I was arranging a pick-up — the squirrel died in front of me. Poor thing, it must have gotten hit by a car. I wish I could have done something, instead of watching it die at my feet as people went obliviously by and listening to recorded messages about how useless all the animals services are. They eventually suggested I let Nature take its course… I know there’s no animal emergency room, and I doubt anyone could have done anything to save it, but not trying would have left such a wound on my conscience. And still I felt so utterly helpless — not to stop Nature, but to make the squirrel’s death something useful and meaningful instead of the byproduct of a busy street. Perhaps if it had died curled around the tree where I found it, it might have decomposed into rich nutrient soil… now it will just be a corpse for someone to grimace at and throw in the garbage. Crap.

The Village Building Convergence is like an impossible dream. People from all over come together to create beautiful structures, tasty food, lush gardens, entertaining art projects, and productive communities. How is this possible? The speakers were all trying to answer this question to some extent, or else they came at it the other way around: How is this not possible? What do we do that prevents people from taking care of their own neighbors and their immediate environment? Monday night, Karen Hery talked about her Swap Shop at the Sunnyside School, which started as a little get together with some friends and grew to encompass an old Masonic building and the other groups who co-inhabit the space. In her experience, one group inevitably wants what the another is dying to give, so getting groups together and working through their differences is most fruitful. Working with kids and adolescents, she also suggested giving jobs to the least competent person still able to do it rather than experts — this allows the inexperienced members to grow while the more experienced ones hang back. Other speakers talked about the importance of human labor, which is the most carbon-neutral way to move, build, and repair things — especially when we have an abundance of humans on the planet! There’s no shame in laying down paving stones, especially when the same stones can be used for generations.

A community center in a Canadian neighborhood called Fernwood had a similar story to tell, but they managed to transform a whole community. A big boarded-up building downtown attracted drug-dealers and prostitutes, but the folks at Fernwood NRG bought it and, with the help of the local community, fixed it up into nice apartments. The drug-dealing and trick-turning stopped — not to say these things are inherently bad, but they appear to be symptoms of an unhealthy community — and people became proud of their neighborhood. The speaker talked about acting FAST — sometimes patience is not a virtue, and causes you to miss opportunities! “Get your wiggle on!” Throw yourself out there and let the universe catch you! It reminds me of the Miles Vorkosigan books I’ve been reading, which basically follow this technique to the maximum: time and time again Miles gets himself into a huge mess, but every time has a stroke of brilliance which turns the mess into something amazingly functional — like a mercenary army, for instance.

All this talk of excitement and activity got me practically leaping out of my chair! But it has to be tempered. The woman from Fernwood told a story about trying to rescue her kitten from a tree, only to get clawed on the way down. Her Russian neighbor said helpfully, “Do you see many kitten skeletons hanging in trees?” No, of course not. Sometimes the best strategy is to not get involved, and the trick is to balance how involved you get and the speed at which you try to introduce change into the community. Karen Hery said that some people, like herself, practically live in community, swimming in it, only returning home to do laundry — others surround themselves with their homes and make little forays into community. I love how non-judgemental she framed this difference, because I am definitely towards to latter side of the spectrum. As much as I love the idea of eco-villages and co-ops, I need my own space, especially my own kitchen. This is especially clear to me as a renter — I feel like I’m just visiting, and I’m bursting at the seams to build a house and plant a garden!

Thursday night, the speakers talked about seed-saving and permaculture. Now, being brand new to this gardening business, it seems quite stupid to do things any differently. Why in the world would you destroy your vegetable garden every year only to buy brand new seeds and start from scratch? All the plowing and sewing… and now it takes work to get vegetables to perennialize again. But you can do it, and it’s totally worth it. I finally got out to a site yesterday, and helped plant a food forest. Basically a food forest is a garden made up of multiple layers of (mostly) edible plants, from fruit and nut trees to berry bushes to herbs and ground covers. You group plants into guilds, with plants fixing nitrogen or building up nutrients or attracting beneficial insects, and everything is positioned such that they get enough sun and rain. The way you design the garden allows it to produce hundreds pounds of food a year with almost no maintenance — you just go and eat the deliciousness!

I love how the more sustainable practices can actually be easier and more convenient. Another example is using geothermal to keep your water supply or your house at a constant 50 degrees F, just by digging down a couple feet. This combined with the fact that radiant-floor heating is so comfortable you can get away with heating your house to 65 degrees means you only have to heat everything up by 15 degrees. That’s easily achievable with a passive solar hot water heater, and you can even collect the water from rainfall. Best of all, the same design keeps your house cool in the summer! No heating or cooling bills, just a little electricity for the water pumps, which you can generate with little solar panels.

My favorite speaker of all was Robert Bolman. His talk was “The Elegant Collapse: Toward a Complete Bottom-to-Top Restructuring of Human Civilaztion” — for those of you who know me, this is right up my ally. Bolman is recovering from his indoctrination into this society, and building a new one over at Maitreya Eco-Village. He’s soft-spoken bright-eyed fellow who laughs easily at himself, reminding me of Mister Rogers. He also provided the most optimistic view of human nature that has every rung true to my ears, which is this: humans have the most amazing ability to talk themselves into believing anything when it’s convenient. Cognitive dissonance is not a psychological disorder so much as an ability we have, allowing Bolman to forgive political figures we might dismiss as greedy hypocrites as being confused instead. They’ve managed to convince themselves that running for office is more important than saving the world. Yet he also critiques many aspects of sustainable efforts, such as the coal and petrol used to produce and transport solar panels, or (with a laugh) the prospect of “peak clay” (imagining the day when cob is a scarce resource). I was reminded of this later when a solar-panel installation guy complained about how sick he was of catering to rich people who thought they were saving the world — the only way to keep up with global change is by building local communities. Jan Semenza, talked about how socially isolated people were the most likely to die in heat waves. Similarly, projects like the Common Good Bank, the Sunnyside Swap Shop, and European seed swaps allow people to find resources within their own communities to build a better future. No, I take that back — build a better present. Bolman painted the perfect picture: if you’re on the sinking Titanic and another ship pulls up, made of sustainable materials and powered by solar-panels, full of people dancing and having a blast, which ship are you going to choose?

Right, you’re going to dive head-long onto the ship of awesome. I’ve already met so many amazing people, and I’ve been inspired to help out on a website for a group that works with Indian craftswomen, to cover my street with swirling chalk art (thanks, PLAIN Janes), to set up a tea stand over at Mount Taber (hibiscus mint, anyone?), and to rock out at Burning Man this September. Most of the other Reed alums I know have gotten jaded over time and pretty much hate people, but the VBC has proven to me that people — yes, even non-Reedies! — can do the most wonderful things without money, without inanity, without fighting. Differences are complementary instead of destructive. Is it magic? Or is it design? Simple: sufficiently brilliant design is indistinguishable from magic.

Poof!

Whew! It’s been a busy week. I’m thankful that Sebastian only works four days a week at the office. On Tuesday, Kellyn and Alex invited a bunch of us to Science Pub, which we arrived two hours early for and still managed not to get any of the big tables. Portland is apparently full of nerds. The lecture was all about undersea volcanoes, including such things as liquid CO2 bubbles, lakes of sulfur, and worm-like pillow lava. That, and a ton of critters in chemotrophic ecosystems, literally living off of the volcanic activity. The most surprising thing was how much the pressure suppresses the explosions — the remote explorer bot could get within feet of the activity, and only a few times got caught in the debris (and even then it was only partially encrusted with rocks and unfortunate crabs). My jaw was loose for most of the thing, and in the end I walked away with two free OMSI tickets for winning the trivia contest (8 out of 10 questions correct, bingo). Totally worth the $2 admission price!

Last night was the second episode in Max Hallock’s Space Opera game, which is basically Star Trek crossed with Battlestar Galactica with alien races from Cosmic Encounter. We are intrepid explorers traversing parallel timelines through a strange anomaly, in search of technology and information that could aid us in defending the Alliance from invaders from the future — or possibly just in search of home. My character, Colonel Amygda Waye, managed to be promoted to Captain after the initial attack killed the original one. She’s secretly a terminator, but in the meantime is something slightly less horrible than a cross between Colonel Tigh and Commander Cain (go, go BSG). But I still get to say, “Engage!” I also have to put up with my crew: Sharak, the competent if cold Shadow security officer and First Officer (played by Thomas), a smart-aleck rock of a science officer, a wiser-than-thou Yoda-Yogi frog-man anthropologist, a hyperactive hot-shot pilot who is also incredibly stupid, a four-armed bounty hunter cat named Dog, a hippie fishy chaplain, a giant sapient ant, and Slurm, a war-profiteering worm-thing that keeps sneaking around and sabotaging equipment without anybody noticing. Try to juggle that bunch whilst stuck in an alternate dimension! Not only that, but we ended on a cliff-hanger — now we’re being pulled onto a prison asteroid called… Rura Penthe.

I will now leave you with a recipe for a delicious apple pie that even pie-haters love (yes, I didn’t even know such people existed, but there were two in our game group, plus an apple-hater who also liked it): Fresh Apple Pie.

The best way to make oneself at home is to get injured and bleed all over the bed. Seriously, it worked like a charm. I moved into Thomas’s Uncle Douglas’s apartment on Tuesday, and Wednesday morning I awoke shivering and ready to go for my almost-barefoot run. I explored the neighborhood, measured the distance to Hawthorne, Belmont, Stark, Burnside… all within my grasp! But I was still cold and dragging my feet, and mere blocks from Douglas’s I tripped mid-stride and slid across the cement paving stones. I rolled over onto my back, stinging all over. I wanted to sob and be carted away, but there was nothing for it but to finish up my run and take my usual shower — with the addition of hydrogen peroxide and much flinching. I banged up my left knee, right hip, and right elbow really bad — so much so that they oozed and bled through the bandages that night onto my crisp white sheets — and scraped up my left hand and right knee. I’ll grace you only with a photograph of the least of my injuries.

A little shaken and stiff, and bussed to my first day at work, and things soon went from bad to awesome. I felt so productive and helpful that my enthusiasm is pay enough (in fact, it’s my only pay). I’m assisting Sebastian Collet, an architect who loves clean, contemporary design and local, natural, community-oriented projects. His office is in the City Repair building, which is essentially an old house overrun by professional hippies (dreadlocks and all). It has a wall of mugs for tea and coffee, a huge pile of pillows in their conference room, and a cushy tea house out back. This is the perfect time to be around there, too, because there are a ton of volunteers getting things ready for the Village Building Convergence. It’s like I found all the gnomes who are work behind the scenes to create the Portland I love — the mosaic benches, the painted intersections, the random acts of community artwork and organic structure. These people are in the very act of creating a better world, and making a noticeable difference with their expertise. And I’m in the middle of it all! I walk home in a daze, awe-struck and love-struck.

My thesis is done, my laurels are about my head, and my Orals Board ate all my sushi. Life is good! For those unaware of the Reed Senior Thesis process, it begins with the looming awareness of its ability to consume the lives of your senior friends. And when it comes upon you, it becomes your constant companion, whether you are working on it or avoiding it. I worked all Spring Break on my thesis, writing almost a chapter a day, only to have my thesis advisor remark that I apparently “don’t write first drafts.” Gavin gave me much more detailed feedback, and with a shiny new conclusion and some pretty, pretty pictures, I rambled along these past few weeks happily writing papers on Excalibur and Buddhist non-dualism and feeling guilty that I had it easy while most of my friends set into last-minute freaking-out. But you know what? We all made it! I turned in copies to all my readers — Steve Hibbard, my advisor and Peirce fanatic, Michael, a phonetician whom I hardly know, Rob, chill anthropologist extraordinaire of my Algonquin and Nature/Culture/Environmentalism classes, and Ken, nationally-recognized as being awesome and a fan of memes and Buddhist hell — and got my laurels to the tune of the Registrar’s office’s gong.

But the real party was last Friday, the beginning of Renn Fayre and the debauchery that is Thesis Parade. I got Cassie to paint wings on my back and mendhi on my hands, with blue and black sharpies that made my skin tingle. The weather held off, and I jumped into the fray of champagne-spraying, hugging, kissing, and foot-stomping with a tremendous contact high. All week people whom I didn’t even know were congratulating me on my fancy, fancy hat, and now, as we danced around our flaming thesis pages and drunkenly hugged Colin Diver, rose petals stuck to our skin and sweet bubbly on our lips, we jumped and danced and ululated and celebrated until we collapsed on the front lawn. Then off again! To shower, to dinner with friends, to a weekend of muddy grass and crazy dancing and mind-shattering fireworks and calm conversational puppy-piles. Where did the days go? Reading week is for Renn Fayre recovery.

But now the future gapes its maw before me, and it gets pretty scary when I think that this was the last thing I had always planned on doing. College, and then sometime in the future, build a house. Anxiety in between! But no, because now I have a room with Thomas’ uncle up on Division, a job as Gavin’s “artisan of space,” with access to his awesome kitchen and his beautiful house — indeed, with a mission to make it more beautiful — and as of this morning, an unpaid job as an architect’s assistant. Sebastian does green, sustainable, and community-oriented projects, one of which is taking Gavin’s house off the grid. As we chatted over tea and bagels, he was especially happy to learn that I’m a web designer, as one of his goals is to put his portfolio online. So I’ll be helping him do research and coordinate and do office work, while learning the tricks of sustainable design and the trade of a passionate architect. I was so excited that I ran all the way back with a smile on my face! Hurrah, huzzah, hurray!

Part of my buzz may be from last night, too, when we saw the 11:15 showing of the Star Trek movie. Can you believe, it was amazing? It was funny and action-packed and fast-paced and classic and fresh-faced. I even got my scantily-clad green girl! And Captain Pike’s in it! The whole theater was jumping up and down in their seats every time a classic line was used, every time a character did something characteristic, every reference that was made, everything that made you want to squeal with geeky joy and hug the characters. Heck, even the non-trekkies in the group loved it!

Sweetness is a life filled with good movies and cool plans and warm sunlight. Go run around in it!